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

This dataset maps 13,700 km of arterial roads in Zimbabwe, providing AI-derived surface types, widths, and passability scores generated by HeiGIT from 2020 and 2024 PlanetScope satellite imagery. It covers motorway, trunk, primary, and secondary road classes, filling gaps where OpenStreetMap (OSM) surface tags are missing for approximately 3,500 km of the network.

Use Cases

• Logistics planning using the Humanitarian Passability Index (HPI) to identify routes suitable for heavy truck transport
• Infrastructure development monitoring by analyzing the Road Surface Change column to identify newly paved segments
• Emergency response routing based on Road Width Class to determine if segments support two-lane unimpeded flow

Strengths

• High surface classification accuracy of 89.2% compared to OSM's 64.7%
• Provides surface data for 0.0135 million km of roads previously missing tags in OSM
• Includes temporal change detection for infrastructure monitoring between 2020 and 2024

Limitations

• Restricted to arterial road networks, omitting rural tracks and local urban streets
• AI-derived predictions from satellite imagery may contain errors not present in ground-level surveys
• The Humanitarian Passability Index is a static model and does not reflect real-time weather-related closures

Provenance

Source

HeiGIT (Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology)

Collection Method

Deep learning analysis of PlanetScope satellite imagery integrated with OpenStreetMap road geometries

Time Range

2020-2024

Freshness

Last updated March 2026; contains temporal comparisons between 2020 and 2024 imagery.

Geography

Zimbabwe