It has been possible to get driving directions from OpenStreetMap data for quite a while, but what’s new and major is the capability to get directions directly from OpenStreetMap, meaning more competition to Google Maps and similar services. This is also discussed over Slashdot.

From the announcement: “Well, the first thing to note is that the philosophy of OpenStreetMap is not to offer a one-stop-shop on our main website, but to create truly open data to empower others to do great things with it. So there has already been fantastic OSM-based travel routing for many years, on excellent websites such as OSRM, Mapquest, Graphhopper, Cyclestreets, Komoot, cycle.travel… the list goes on and on. But all of those things are on other websites and apps, so people don’t always realise that OpenStreetMap has this power. What this latest development has done is really neat: the OSM website offers directions which are actually provided by third-party systems, but they are included in the main site via some crafty JavaScript coding. So as well as being really handy in itself to have directions available, it helps “first glancers” to see all the things they can do with OSM.”