osm-mcpThe world map, in the conversation

An MCP server for OpenStreetMap travel planning: geocoding, walking/driving/cycling routes, multi-stop optimization, isochrones and POI search — over free public services, with no API key.

Get started

Tools reference

GitHub

Walking routes that are actually walking routes

The public OSRM demo servers ignore the profile inside the OSRM URL and always answer with car routes unless the FOSSGIS routed-foot/bike/car path prefixes are used. Most OSM MCP servers get this wrong; this one uses the prefixes, and its live smoke test asserts that foot routes come out much slower than car routes.

Policy-compliant by construction

Per-service client-side rate limiting, a mandatory identifying User-Agent, response caching, capped Overpass concurrency and automatic failover to an Overpass mirror on 429/5xx — the published usage policies of the shared community services are enforced in code.

No API key, read-only by design

Every backend is a free public OpenStreetMap service and all 11 tools are read-only. The only optional secret is an OpenRouteService key, which is scrubbed from the environment after loading and redacted from error messages.

The server speaks stdio, holds no credentials by default, and throttles itself below the published limits of every public OSM service it calls.

Terminal recording: the server lists its 11 tools, geocodes a place name and answers the same route on foot and by car — with the foot route several times slower, proving the FOSSGIS profile prefixes work

In one command

claude mcp add osm -- npx -y osm-mcp

No URL, no token — the public OpenStreetMap services are the default configuration. Then ask things like "how long is the walk from the Louvre to Notre-Dame?", "plan the best order to visit these five places", "what can I reach in 15 minutes on foot from my hotel?" or "find a fair cafe for the three of us to meet".

What it does not do

By design: no writes to OpenStreetMap (the API for that is not even wired up), no map image rendering, no GPS tracking, no traffic data, and no bulk geocoding — the client-side throttles that keep it inside the public services' usage policies make it deliberately unsuitable for hammering. For heavy or commercial use, self-host the backends and point the *_BASE_URL variables at them. See Security.