Public · no account needed
The map
Schools, clinics, markets, shops and filling stations across Zambia — where they are, and the road from where you are to where you are going. Drawn from open data and our own tiles.
Route
Want a driver?
Access
Public — no sign-in
Pins
Live — mapped by the public, filtered by kind
Routing
Live — real road paths, or none
Layers
National spatial data, drawn on request
Where these pins come from
Most of them were not put there by us.
The map starts full rather than empty, and almost nothing on it was put there by us. It is drawn from two public sources, and every pin says which one it came from.
OpenStreetMap gives us the shops, restaurants, filling stations, guest houses and places of worship that people across Zambia mapped by hand and keep correcting. We take the ones that carry a name, because an unnamed dot is not a place you can send anybody to — that is about a third of what is in the data. It is licensed under the Open Database Licence, which asks for attribution wherever it is used, and that is why it is named on the map and on every card that came from it.
The Zambia National Spatial Data Infrastructure gives us the things the state has counted: schools from the education ministry and the statistics agency, health facilities from the health ministry, markets and public facilities from the lands survey. It is better than the volunteer data where the two overlap — three times as many schools — and where they do overlap we keep one pin, not two.
Neither is a claim about quality. A pin says here is a school. It does not say we have been there, and it certainly does not say what a directory entry says, which is we settle payments with this business. The two live apart on purpose, and collapsing them would let the weaker claim borrow the stronger one's credibility.
Both imports are refreshed rather than frozen, so a correction made at the source reaches this map instead of being overwritten by a copy taken once and forgotten.
Why we serve our own tiles
A map that does not report you to anyone.
Most embedded maps fetch their imagery straight from somebody else's servers. That is a request from your browser to a third party, carrying your address, for every square of the map you look at.
This one does not. The tiles are requested by this site, cached here, and served from the same origin as the page. Nothing about your visit leaves the country to draw the map. It costs us bandwidth and it means the first look at a new town is a little slower — that is the trade, and it is the same trade the rest of this site makes.
The map data itself is OpenStreetMap, which is the work of people who mapped Zambia by hand. The attribution in the corner stays there.
What is coming
Pins, then paths.
Adding your own
- Drop the point on the map — no typing coordinates
- Every submission held until somebody has looked at it
- Nothing published unreviewed, however quiet the map is
Reaching further
- Saved and shareable routes, not just ones you draw
- More national layers as terms for them are agreed
- Search that reaches a pin by name, not only by eye
What it will not do
- Track you, or keep where you have been
- Ask for your location unless you ask it to
- Draw a straight line and call it a route
The honest limit
A straight line is not a route.
When the routing engine cannot answer, this map says so and draws a dashed direct link labelled as exactly that. It never presents a straight line as a road you can drive.
There are three different answers and the map distinguishes them, because they mean different things to somebody about to set off. The engine could not be reached — we do not know. The engine answered and found no road between those two points — there may genuinely be none. Or there is a route, in which case the distance, the time and the number of points that make up the line are all shown, so the claim can be checked rather than taken.
That rule is not decoration. On the operations side of this platform the routing engines were once unreachable for seven days, and every map carried on drawing as though nothing were wrong — which is worse than drawing nothing, because a wrong answer gets acted on. Every surface that draws a path now goes through one piece of code whose only job is to refuse to lie about it.
Related
Operations edition
Commerce edition
All six editions