USA Arterial Road Surface and Passability for 1.38 Million Km

HeiGIT produced this dataset mapping 1.389 million km of arterial roads in the United States using PlanetScope satellite imagery from 2020 and 2024. It provides AI-derived attributes for road surface, width, and a Humanitarian Passability Index (HPI) for segments classified as motorway, trunk, primary, or secondary in OpenStreetMap.

Use Cases

• Monitoring infrastructure modernization by identifying segments that transitioned from unpaved to paved in the Road Surface Change field
• Route optimization for heavy machinery using Road Width Class to identify lanes wider than 5.5 meters
• Emergency response planning using the Humanitarian Passability Index (HPI) to prioritize accessible transport corridors

Strengths

• 89.2% surface model accuracy
• 1.389 million km coverage
• Temporal change detection (2020-2024)
• Fills 1.37 million km of missing OSM surface tags

Limitations

• Excludes tertiary and residential road classes
• AI-derived predictions may contain errors compared to ground-level imagery
• Geographic focus is restricted to the United States

Provenance

Source

HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology)

Collection Method

AI-derived predictions from PlanetScope satellite imagery combined with OpenStreetMap attributes.

Time Range

2020-2024

Freshness

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

Geography

United States of America