alt Hacker NewsShow HN: I mapped every US golf course
I got tired of Googling basic course info, so I made a free directory of every US course
Google filters for golf course results are terrible so I built a better way to browse courses using OSM as the backbone.... https://golfcoursebrowser.com/
It's a work in progress and mostly US for now, but I want to expand to the rest of North America, the EU, and the rest of the world ASAP.
It's free, no ads, no login, no bs. If you spot anything wrong (bad info, a missing course, wrong scorecard), you can flag it right on the course page. I actually read those and fix them.
Still a lot of missing info, but I'm filling out more and more each day. The goal is the most complete, and current golf course directory in the world, verified and maintained by actual golfers. I think is attainable in the next few months. The base layer is OpenStreetMap, cross-checked against course websites and enriched with scorecards, USGA rating/slope, and public/private status. User corrections from golfers who know their home course have beaten every commercial data source we check against.
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So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped.
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
Nice job! When I zoom in on Google earth you can easily see if it’s actually a golf course or not, would been interesting to use this to draw up the areas with polygons and some more details.
Then you could start providing a lot more details about each one automatically.
This is supercool. But I have a tangential question. I see projects like this built on top of OSM for different use cases. Does this data gets contributed back to OSM. A lot of them seems hobby projects, so it's hard to maintain long term, but the data is quite useful and could be used beyond the lifetime of these projects if they can be contributed back to OSM somehow.
Golf is a sport I never tried but really want to. Also from the outside it looks both fun and relaxing to be outside in the nature. But I’m in the wrong country for that currently lol, golf is a niche here in Eastern Europe
It appears Four Sister’s golf course in allegany county md is missing.
I am surprised that Google Maps has never mounted a camera on a golf cart and driven it over golf course holes. They have a backpack version and they've used it on ski resorts.
I noticed the site is actually quite slow to load on first visit (at least for me). Is it actually loading in all the courses up front?
If so, a better experience would be a landing page where users can search or specify a geographic location - only loading in what is relevant for the query.
It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/
I was going to say you were missing this one but I'm not sure if it's still open after the county purchased it.
https://www.pga.com/play/ny/rome/mohawk-glen-golf-course/033...
Now add mini golf courses.
As I recall, OSM already tends to have many golf courses mapped in extreme detail, because there’s a game that lets you play OSM golf courses on your golf simulator.
This sometimes leads to conflict between the game’s passionate users and OSM, when they map every road around a golf course as a cart path, because that’s the only thing the game imports.
Possible bug: Went scrolling way East on the map for kicks and was surprised to find 14 courses on Guam, but also that the data don't repopulate as you make it back around the globe a second time. This seems to happen in both directions—eg Guam doesn't populate at all if you scroll West.
This is fascinating not because I’m interested in visiting any of these. But to see the communities in Alaska with courses, or to look at the most concentrated places and wonder what so many people in Florida get out of having a fairway and one hole right in their backyard..
Do you plan to contribute the data back into OSM? That would be the nice way to go to share with the community and allow you to have better data in the future with less maintenance work.
this is a great resource we can use when we Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forest!
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-make-the-g...
You have hidden greens in Solon springs Wisconsin but you have it on the wrong side of the lake. It's like a 25-minute drive around the lake to get to it.
I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
Great job! This is very useful.
The search by city, state doesn't seem to work.
If you enter something like "los angeles, ca" it returns no results.
zip code search works fine.
Missing this one on Bainbridge Island, outside of Seattle:
https://nwhickoryplayers.org/2015/08/ccs/
Believe it is only open for residents in that area
Polygon areas would be cool to see how big they are. I made this few years ago for Singapore https://observablehq.com/@cheeaun/golf-courses-in-singapore
Somehow it disturbs me that we have access to a far-away, tropical island and use the very limited space there for not just one, but eight golf courses
great! have you seen https://openskimap.org/ and https://openskistats.org/... maybe change name to open golf map?
This is badass. Thank you!
Near my area, there is a driving range and a simulator place as pins. both nice but not courses. Do you want reports on that?
A buddy made golf.bronnerapp.com to map golf courses that we had played.
No information on Olympic Club. I’m a member. Let me know if you need info for filling the gaps there.
if you want to create custom maps there's https://mapcomplete.org/
Would be sweet if it also had membership status (private/public/etc)
Are you planning to do somthing similar other than US?
This map just shows how terrible more priviledged people are and destroy our environment for their rich boi "fun"
clicked on a website link for a course near me and it took me to a weird site wopraja
so thats why lebron wanted to go to philadelphia or miami
Golf courses in USA use half a trillion gallons of fresh water annually.
All data centers use less than 0.2 (of which only less than 0.02 is used for cooling the servers, the rest is just electricity generation, which can and should be replaced with solar).
There's no replacement for water usage for golf courses and even half a trillion number is after recent 30% reduction of usage from what it was before.
fun-fact:
people living next to golf courses have extremely high rates of cancer and Parkinsons
and if a golf course is next to an airport you probably should never ever go there due to the total toxicity
are we able to estimate water usage and other statistics from this data set?
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Or just run Overpass OSM query with `node["leisure"="golf_course"]`
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL
I am not sure how it is in USA but in my country golf courses are abuse of public resources for (almost) private use. For a very few who can lobby enough for renewal of these leases and these are kept out of reach of the normal public, either by rule or by cost, sometimes both. Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world, but I do believe they should not be kept exclusive. Also, this comes directly from feudal/colonial times here. Those also require too much of other natural and public resources to be maintained.