Fire stations — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a fire station — a feature tagged `amenity=fire_station` in OpenStreetMap. 144,705 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the footprint of the building.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — which brigade 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.

Why this map has no colours

Everything here is one colour, and that is a decision rather than an omission.

The division worth drawing would be volunteer against professional, which is the single most useful thing to know about a country's fire cover. OpenStreetMap has no tag for it with usable coverage: `fire_station:type` is recorded on under 5% of stations, and what it means varies between countries. A legend built on that would describe a twentieth of the map.

So the map is sized by footprint instead — which does separate a city station with an appliance hall from a village one with a single bay — and the brigade's name is a row in the panel when you click a station. A German Freiwillige Feuerwehr says what it is in its own name.

Germany has almost seven hundred times India's rate, and both halves of that are real

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

Germany — 348.1 per million, 28,994 in total
Australia — 135.0 per million, 3,592
United States — 104.4 per million, 35,065
France — 91.9 per million, 6,264
Japan — 51.0 per million, 6,345
United Kingdom — 31.3 per million, 2,113
Brazil — 5.3 per million, 1,142
Indonesia — 1.4 per million, 392
China — 1.4 per million, 1,904
India — 0.5 per million, 720
Nigeria — 0.1 per million, 27

Germany's rate is about 691 times India's, one of the widest gaps on this site. Two separate things produce it, and both are true at once.

The first is real geography. German fire cover is built on the Freiwillige Feuerwehr: a volunteer brigade in almost every village, with its own small station. That is a genuinely different way of organising a fire service from a smaller number of professional stations covering a region, and it genuinely puts far more fire stations on the ground per head.

The second is mapping. German OpenStreetMap coverage is unusually thorough, so that real difference is also more completely recorded than most countries' provision is.

There is no way to separate the two from this data, and it would be misleading to present the figure as only one of them. A reader comparing Germany with India is seeing a real difference in how fire cover is organised, magnified by an unequal amount of mapping.

Read the whole table as evidence rather than proof, on the same grounds.

Most of this map is traced

60.4% of the layer has a footprint — 87,337 of the 144,705 features are drawn as an outline rather than marked as a point. That is the highest share of any layer added in this group, and there is a reason for it: a fire station needs an appliance hall with doors onto the road, so it is nearly always a building of its own rather than a unit inside somebody else's, and a mapper who is there draws it.

The remaining 39.6% are drawn at one nominal size, set at the median of those that do have a shape, so a dot's size is not telling you how large those stations are. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

That also makes this layer's size figures more trustworthy than the police stations layer's, whose traced minority is disproportionately the standalone compounds.

The largest features are not stations

The top of this map by area is training grounds and regional depots rather than town stations. The largest feature is 1,794,836 m², a hundred times the 99th percentile of the layer.

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

One technical exclusion: the selection matches the tag exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=fire_station;police` is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon.

Some of these are ambulance stations too

508 features on this map are also tagged as an ambulance station, and that is a real institution rather than a tagging error — a combined station housing both services is normal in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. They are counted here, and they are on the ambulance stations map as well.

On the emergency services map, which shows police, fire, ambulance and rescue together in four colours, those same combined stations are drawn in the fire colour — a fire station with an ambulance in it is what somebody walking past would call it.

Naming

84.3% carry a name. The unnamed remainder is mostly village stations, which is unfortunate given that those are exactly the features driving this layer's distribution.

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 fire stations 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 512 m², the 90th percentile 3,735 m² and the 99th 17,609 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