Emergency services — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a place an emergency service is based: a police station, a fire station, an ambulance station or a rescue post. There are more than 320,000 worldwide, which makes this the largest map on the site by number of features. Colour represents which service it is, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. 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 feature here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any national register of emergency services.

What we include

Four groups of tags, and only places a service is based:

Police is `amenity=police`, which is about half the map.
Fire is `amenity=fire_station`, which is about 45%.
Ambulance is `emergency=ambulance_station`, which is about 5%.
Rescue is `emergency=lifeguard`, `emergency=mountain_rescue` or `emergency=water_rescue_station`, which is about 2%.

Fire hydrants are not here. OpenStreetMap holds more than three million of them, and a hydrant is equipment rather than a station. Neither are defibrillators, emergency telephones, assembly points or hospitals. A hospital does appear where somebody has also tagged an ambulance station on it.

Colour

Colour represents which of the four services a place is, and that uses up all the colour this map has. Each service also has a map of its own, where the colour is free to say something else instead.

Some stations are two services at once

More than 500 features carry two of these tags, and almost all of them are a fire station that is also an ambulance station. A combined station housing both is a normal arrangement in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, so the feature genuinely claims to be both. Each dot has one colour, so we draw them as fire, because a fire station with an ambulance in it is what somebody walking past would call it. Click one and the panel shows what the feature actually says.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the building in square metres. About half of this map has no outline at all, and those features are drawn at one nominal size, so for half the map the size of a dot is not telling you how large the station is. Among the features that do have a shape, the typical one covers about 510 m². The two large services differ here, 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 training grounds and patrol territories rather than buildings. The biggest of all is a desert patrol area tagged over the whole territory it covers. We cap the size scale far below that so ordinary stations stay distinguishable from one another.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a station there, not that a place has no emergency cover. Two of the four services are especially easy to misread. An ambulance is often based at a hospital or a fire station with nothing separate to tag, and a rescue post needs a coast, a mountain range or a river before it can exist at all. Countries also organise these services differently, and a country built on volunteer village fire brigades genuinely has more separate stations than one covering the same ground from a few professional bases.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A station shown here may have closed, and a closed station often keeps its building for years.

Source and licence

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