Inferring and Improving Street Maps with Data-Driven Automation

Street maps help to inform a wide range of decisions. Drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians use them for search and navigation. Rescue workers responding to disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis, and earthquakes rely on street maps to understand where people are and to locate individual buildings.23 Transportation researchers consult street maps to conduct transportation studies, such as analyzing pedestrian accessibility to public transport.25 Indeed, with the need for accurate street maps growing in importance, companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to map roads globally.a However, street maps are incomplete or lag behind new construction in many parts of the world. In rural Indonesia, for example, entire groups of villages are missing from OpenStreet-Map, a popular open map dataset.3 In many of these villages, the closest mapped road is miles away. In Qatar, construction of new infrastructure has boomed in preparation for the FIFA World Cup 2022.