South Africa Road Network from OpenStreetMap with Multilingual Names

OpenStreetMap exports for South Africa containing all features tagged as highways. The dataset includes attributes for road classification, physical characteristics, and names in multiple South African languages. It is provided by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and was last updated on 2026-03-03.

Use Cases

• Mapping road networks and connectivity based on highway classification and geometry.
• Assessing road infrastructure quality based on surface and smoothness attributes.
• Developing multilingual navigation systems based on name tags in languages like Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa.
• Analyzing traffic flow patterns based on oneway and lanes attributes.
• Identifying and modeling bridge structures based on bridge and layer tags.

Strengths

• Includes detailed road attributes like surface, smoothness, width, and lanes.
• Provides road names in at least 11 languages, including major South African languages.
• Available in multiple geospatial formats (GeoPackage, GeoJSON, SHP, KML, GARMIN IMG).

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Freshness should be verified as the last update date is in the future (2026-03-03).

Provenance

Source

Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT)

Collection Method

Export of OpenStreetMap features where the 'highway' tag is not null.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-03 10:43:53.484733.

Geography

South Africa