Ambulance stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is an ambulance station. There are more than 15,000 worldwide. The size of a dot represents the footprint of the building, and there is only one colour. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the service that runs it. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every station here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from aerial imagery. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of emergency services.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `emergency=ambulance_station`, and nothing else. That is deliberately narrow. The `emergency` key holds more than three million objects in OpenStreetMap, and most of them are fire hydrants, so we never take the key as a whole.

Two things you might expect are missing. A hospital with an ambulance bay appears only if somebody has tagged the bay itself. An air ambulance base appears only where it carries this tag rather than a heliport tag.

Colour

There is one colour, and that is a decision rather than something we forgot. OpenStreetMap records nothing about an ambulance station that could carry a legend. There is no consistent tag for the size of a station, the number of vehicles it holds, or whether it is staffed around the clock. Size represents the building instead, and the operator is in the panel when you click.

The biggest dots are hospital sites

At the top of the size range are hospital campuses and Red Cross centres where somebody has put the tag on the whole plot rather than on the garage. One near Milan covers nearly nine hectares. These draw much larger than any real station. There are few enough of them to be a tail rather than a pattern, and no rule we could write would remove them without also removing genuine regional centres, so we leave them in and tell you about them here.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the station in square metres. About 55% of stations are drawn as an outline, and among those the typical station covers about 410 m². That is a garage for two or three vehicles with a crew room. The rest are recorded as a single point with no shape, and we draw those at one nominal size. Being mapped as a point usually says something about the mapper's time rather than about the station.

Where the map is empty

An empty area on this map does not mean there are no ambulances there. Read the blank space carefully, because two quite different things produce it.

In much of the world an ambulance is based at a hospital, a health centre or a fire station, and there is nothing separate to tag. In Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France a station is usually a distinct site with its own address, so it gets an object of its own. Where nobody has mapped a station at all, we can't show it either.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A station that closed some time ago may stay on the map until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

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