UAE Road Surface, Width, and Passability for 16,200 km of Arterials

HeiGIT produced this dataset covering 16,200 km of arterial roads in the United Arab Emirates using PlanetScope satellite imagery from 2020 and 2024. It provides AI-derived surface types, width classifications, and passability scores to supplement OpenStreetMap data.

Use Cases

• Assessing logistical constraints for heavy transport using the Road Width Class to identify segments narrower than 3.5 meters
• Evaluating humanitarian access routes via the Humanitarian Passability Index (HPI) which ranks segments from 1 to 6
• Tracking national infrastructure progress by identifying segments that transitioned from unpaved to paved in the Road Surface Change field

Strengths

• High surface prediction accuracy of 89.2%
• Covers 16,200 km of arterial road segments
• Includes temporal change detection between 2020 and 2024

Limitations

• Focuses exclusively on arterial roads, excluding local or residential streets
• Relies on AI-derived predictions with a ~10.8% error rate

Provenance

Source

HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology)

Collection Method

AI-derived predictions from PlanetScope satellite imagery integrated with OpenStreetMap road segments

Time Range

2020-2024

Freshness

Imagery from 2020 and 2024; last updated March 2026.

Geography

United Arab Emirates