Emergency services — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a place an emergency service is based — a police station, a fire station, an ambulance station, or a rescue post — as tagged in OpenStreetMap. 324,950 of them worldwide, coloured by which service it is and sized by the footprint of the building.

This is the largest map on HueMaps by number of features.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who runs it, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The four services

Police — `amenity=police`. 157,806, or 48.6% of the map.
Fire — `amenity=fire_station`. 144,704, or 44.5%.
Ambulance — `emergency=ambulance_station`. 15,324, or 4.7%.
Rescue — `emergency=lifeguard`, `mountain_rescue` or `water_rescue_station`. 7,116, or 2.2%.

Some stations are two services at once

523 features carry two of those tags, and 508 of them are a fire station that is also an ambulance station. That is not a tagging mistake: a combined station housing both services is a normal arrangement, particularly in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and the feature genuinely claims to be both.

The map has one colour per dot, so it has to choose, and it draws them as fire. The building is a fire station with an ambulance in it, which is what somebody walking past would call it. Click one and the panel shows what the feature actually says, so the choice of colour hides nothing.

The other fifteen are six police-and-rescue, four police-and-ambulance, four fire-and-rescue, and a single station that is police, fire and ambulance together.

Where emergency services are thickest

Counted crudely — features inside a country's boundary, per million people:

Germany — 446.1 per million, 37,161 in total
Australia — 234.9 per million, 6,249
France — 210.9 per million, 14,381
Japan — 163.3 per million, 20,335
United States — 156.1 per million, 52,438
United Kingdom — 71.7 per million, 4,849
Brazil — 45.5 per million, 9,855
Indonesia — 13.3 per million, 3,684
China — 6.9 per million, 9,762
India — 3.6 per million, 5,178
Nigeria — 1.4 per million, 306

Germany's rate is about 123 times India's, which is a high figure by the standards of this site. That number is almost entirely about two of the four services, and reading it as one thing would be a mistake.

Police are spread evenly; fire stations are not

Taking the same Germany-to-India ratio service by service:

Police — about 15. One of the most evenly spread things HueMaps maps. Japan is the densest country measured at 111.8 stations per million people, which is the kōban neighbourhood-post system showing up as data; then France at 91.9, Australia 60.2, Germany 46.5, Brazil 36.3. A reader who expected a policing map to be a map of rich countries will find it is not one.
Fire — about 691. Germany runs 348 stations per million people against India's 0.5. Two things produce that at once, and both are true. German fire cover is a volunteer brigade in almost every village rather than a small number of professional stations covering a region, so the density is a genuine difference in how the country organises the service — and German OpenStreetMap mapping is unusually thorough, so that genuine difference is also more completely recorded. A reader comparing the two countries is seeing real geography magnified by unequal mapping, and there is no way to separate the two from this data.
Ambulance — about 1,485. Mostly a question of whether a station is tagged separately at all. Germany records 40.5 per million, Japan 0.32, India 0.03 — and Japan plainly has ambulances. Elsewhere they run from a hospital or from a fire station, and where it is a fire station the feature is drawn in this map's fire colour rather than its ambulance one.
Rescue — about 1,533. Lifeguards, mountain rescue and water rescue posts, which need a coast, a mountain range or a river before they can exist at all, and are mapped far more completely in Europe than elsewhere.

So the composite figure is dominated by the two services whose absence from a country most often means "not tagged this way" rather than "not there".

Each of these four has a map of its own

Police stations, fire stations, ambulance stations and rescue services each have their own layer, showing the same objects as the corresponding class here. That is on purpose. This map spends its colour on which service a place is and has none left for anything else; a single-service map can be read in ways this one cannot — the rescue services layer, for instance, separates lifeguards from mountain rescue from water rescue, which this one folds into a single class.

The counts agree with this map to within a handful of features in each case. The small differences are the combined stations above, counted once here and once on each of the two maps they belong to.

What is not here

Only places a service is based are on this map. Fire hydrants are not — there are over three million of them tagged in OpenStreetMap, and they are equipment rather than a station. Neither are defibrillators, emergency telephones, assembly points or hospitals. A hospital that also has an ambulance station tagged on it does appear, because of that second tag.

One technical exclusion: the selection matches each tag value exactly, so a feature tagged `emergency=ambulance_station;lifeguard` — one post doing both — is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon.

Half of this map is a point, not a shape

48.3% of the layer has no footprint at all. Only 167,914 of the 324,950 features are traced as an outline.

The size of a dot is therefore often not telling you how large the station is. Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

The two large services differ here: fire stations are traced 60.4% of the time and police stations only 43.8%, because a fire station usually has an appliance hall of its own while a police station is often a unit inside a civic building.

The largest features are not stations

The top of this map by area is training grounds and patrol territories, not buildings. A police academy with a driving circuit and a firing range covers more ground than any city headquarters. The largest feature of all is 94,786,087 m² — a desert patrol area tagged over the whole territory it covers rather than the post it is run from, and two and a half thousand times the 99th percentile of the layer.

The size scale is capped far below that so ordinary stations stay distinguishable from one another.

Naming

84.4% carry a name, and three of the four services are alike — police 86.5%, ambulance 84.8%, fire 84.3%. Rescue is 42.0%, and that is honest rather than a gap: a lifeguard tower or a water rescue point is equipment rather than a building with a name on it. Clicking a rescue feature will often tell you little.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a building they walked past. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no national register of emergency services has been merged in.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the traced features, the median footprint is 510 m², the 90th percentile 4,683 m² and the 99th 37,652 m².

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. A station shown here may have closed, and a closed station often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map