Stories

Ashgabat, capital of Turkmenistan, sits in a category 4 seismic zone. A 7.3 MMS earthquake in 1948 leveled the city, leaving only three buildings standing, and killed an estimated 160,000 people. Recognizing that a detailed map of the city would be crucially important in the event of another such calamity, U.S. Ambassador to Turkmenistan Allan Mustard and his wife, Ann, began spending evenings and weekends mapping Ashgabat early in 2015 using Open Street Map (OSM) and data collected on their GPS navigator. When they started, the map was incomplete and badly out of date. Only about a dozen city streets bore names in OSM, many new streets were not on the map, and few points of interest (POIs) had been identified. Compounding the problem was the Turkmenistan government’s expenditure of over $14 billion during this period on urban renewal, which included addition of 60 kilometers of new streets, rebuilding of all major thoroughfares in the city, demolition of entire neighborhoods and construction of new ones, plus a complete overhaul of the city’s airport.

A little over two and a half years later, aided by updated imagery provided via MapGive, the ambassador with assistance from the Embassy Ashgabat motor pool, other Embassy employees, and other residents of the city has created an up-to-date map of Ashgabat showing not only streets but public buildings, filling stations, hospitals and clinics, other embassies, hotels, and other amenities, plus providing their street addresses and telephone numbers.

In addition to improving disaster preparedness, everyday quality of life in Ashgabat has improved due to this mapping project. Two new taxicab apps, TM! Taksi and Tiz Taxi, use the OSM base map for users to summon taxicabs in Ashgabat. Two smartphone apps, Pocket Earth and MAPS.ME, use OSM for their offline maps, helping people navigate the city. For drivers with Garmin GPS navigators, free downloadable maps drawn from the OSM database can be downloaded from a site in the Netherlands. Apple Maps began using the OSM database for Turkmenistan. Perhaps most noteworthy was the decision of Turkmenistan’s National Olympic Committee to use the OSM base map in the official smartphone app for the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games that Ashgabat hosted in September 2017.