Laos Arterial Road Surface and Passability Data (2020-2024)

HeiGIT produced this dataset mapping approximately 8,000 km of arterial roads in Laos using 2020 and 2024 PlanetScope satellite imagery. It provides AI-derived classifications for road surface, width, and humanitarian passability for motorway, trunk, primary, and secondary road segments.

Use Cases

• Assessing logistical accessibility for heavy vehicles using the Humanitarian Passability Index (HPI)
• Monitoring national infrastructure progress via the Road Surface Change indicator
• Identifying narrow bottlenecks using Road Width Class

Strengths

• 89.2% surface prediction accuracy
• Temporal change detection between 2020 and 2024
• Fills surface tags for 56.4% of roads missing OSM data

Limitations

• Geographic restriction to Laos
• Exclusion of non-arterial road networks
• Reliance on AI-derived predictions which may contain classification errors

Provenance

Source

Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT)

Collection Method

AI-derived predictions from PlanetScope satellite imagery combined with OpenStreetMap road geometries

Time Range

2020-2024

Freshness

Last updated March 2026; contains imagery-derived data from 2020 and 2024.

Geography

Lao People's Democratic Republic