What is osm-mcp?

OpenStreetMap is the free, community-built map of the world, and a whole ecosystem of open services runs on top of it: geocoders, routing engines, POI databases. That is exactly what an assistant needs when you plan a trip — and exactly what it cannot reach without tools.

osm-mcp is a Model Context Protocol server that connects the two. It exposes 11 read-only tools over the public OpenStreetMap services: geocoding (Nominatim and Photon), routing, travel-time matrices and stop-order optimization (OSRM), isochrones (Valhalla), POI search and details (Overpass), plus offline great-circle distance and openstreetmap.org link generation. No API key is required — an OpenRouteService key can optionally switch the routing engine.

What you can do with it

• Turn names into places. "Where exactly is the Louvre?" "What's at 49.6116, 6.1319?" Photon is typo-tolerant, so "Luvre" works too.
• Plan real travel. "How long is the walk from the hotel to the station?" "Compare these 5 hotels against these 3 sights by travel time." "What order should I visit my six stops in?"
• Explore an area. "What can I reach in 15 minutes on foot?" "Vegan restaurants within 500 m of the cathedral?" "When is that museum open, and do they have a website?"
• Coordinate people. "Find a cafe that's fair for all three of us" — the server searches venues around the midpoint and picks the one with the most balanced travel times.

Every place input accepts either a name/address (geocoded automatically) or literal coordinates as "lat,lon".

Why another OSM MCP server?

Two reasons, and the first one is a genuine correctness bug elsewhere:

1. Correct walking and cycling routes. The public OSRM demo servers ignore the profile segment inside the OSRM URL path and always return car routes unless the FOSSGIS routed-foot / routed-bike / routed-car path prefixes are used. Most existing OSM MCP servers get this wrong and silently return driving times for walking queries — a "10 minute walk" that is actually a 10 minute drive. This server uses the prefixes, and its live smoke test asserts that foot routes are much slower than car routes.
2. Policy compliance built in. The public OSM services are shared community infrastructure with published usage policies. This server enforces them client-side: 1 request/second to Nominatim, Photon, OSRM, Valhalla and Overpass, a mandatory identifying User-Agent, response caching, at most 2 concurrent Overpass requests, and automatic failover to an Overpass mirror on 429/5xx instead of retry-hammering.

There is also a third: optional Photon support. komoot's Photon geocoder is typo-tolerant and designed for interactive use — a better fit for LLM-driven lookups than sending every fuzzy guess to Nominatim.

What it is not

It is not a map renderer — results are structured data and openstreetmap.org links, not images. It is not a live-traffic navigator: OSRM's travel times come from OpenStreetMap road data, not congestion feeds. And it is not a bulk-geocoding pipeline; the throttles that keep it inside the public usage policies make it deliberately slow for that. For heavy use, self-host the services and point the *_BASE_URL variables at them.

How it fits together

The server speaks stdio and never listens on a port. Your MCP client starts it as a child process; it holds no credentials by default and calls the public services over HTTPS with rate limiting and caching in between. There is no daemon to run and nothing to expose.

Next

• Getting started — install, first call
• Connecting clients — Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Codex, Docker
• Tools reference — all 11, with every parameter