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Roadside
MapMap Roadside is a positioned register of what stands beside the road on the segments a highways team commissions: signs, road markings, street nameplates, lighting columns, street furniture, kerbs, crossings, utility covers and shopfronts. Each feature carries its position, how that position was derived, the value read off it where the text was legible, and a link to the dated photograph it was read from. A second, road-facing camera on the same drive reads the carriageway surface. This page is the technical summary; the Roadside product page is the overview.
Roadside is a survey you commission, not an API you call: there is no public endpoint that returns Roadside features, and no self-serve signup. What you can open today without talking to anyone is the live viewer and the data dictionary.
What a highways team gets
The register. One layer per asset class, in British National Grid, with stable feature identifiers so a later pass lines up against this one. Every feature has the same fields (below), and a field that could not be filled says so rather than being dropped.
The photograph behind each value. Every record links to the frame it was read from. The frames stay on our side and are reached through the per-feature evidence link, so your system stores the record and the link, not the imagery. Hosted access to those links is included for three years from delivery; the layers themselves are yours to keep whether or not you renew it (pricing).
The carriageway. A road-facing camera captures a geotagged frame of the carriageway roughly every 4 metres of the drive. Cracking, worn markings, patches and reinstatements, ironwork, edge fretting and inspectors' painted marks are read as records, each with a class, a position, a confidence, a graded severity and a link to its frame. Severity is a visual grade for prioritising an inspection, never a measured depth.
A method and QA statement per delivery: how it was captured, how positions were derived, what the human review sample covered, and where the unknowns are. Your term maintenance contractor and consultants can use the data for your scheme by notification.
Faces and number plates
Faces and number plates are detected so that they can be obscured, and they are obscured before a frame is shared, delivered or published: before anything leaves us. Detection is not identification; nothing is matched to a person, a record or another pass. The obscuring on a delivered set is audited, and the audit date is recorded beside the capture date, so a published sample carries both (the public demo: captured 14 August 2026, blur audit cleared 25 August 2026).
Blurring does not make a frame anonymous, and we do not say it does: blurred frames are still personal data, and raw and blurred frames are held separately. What is captured, the lawful basis, and how anyone in a frame can ask for it to be removed are in the Roadside imagery notice.
The live viewer and the sample pack
- The viewer: roadside.mapmap.ai/demo serves the seafront kilometre of the Brighton and Hove pass of 14 August 2026, openly and with no login: 4,146 positioned features, 3,411 carriageway defect reads and 2,008 blurred photographs, each with its evidence link working. Those counts describe the extract, not the full 54.9 km pass. Click a feature and it opens the frame it was read from.
- The sample pack: /roadside/sample-pack publishes the data dictionary in full. The sample layer itself, one asset class from the same pass as GeoJSON with the dictionary beside it, is sent on request from that page.
- Routing on the surface reads: /demo/roadside-cycle scores two bicycle routes between the same points against the carriageway reads from the Brighton pass (demos).
Formats and exports
| What | Form |
|---|---|
| Delivered layers | One layer per asset class, British National Grid, schema roadside-products-v4, stable object_id per feature |
| Sample layer | One asset class as GeoJSON, sent on request |
| Evidence | A per-feature link to the frame, held and served by us |
| Documentation | The data dictionary, and a method and QA statement per delivery |
Every feature carries the same fields, grouped as the dictionary groups them:
- Identity and provenance:
object_id,category,category_label,subtype,street,drive,captured. - What was read:
value(null where nothing legible was read),legible,detail,conf_max_pct,conf_mean_pct. - How it was placed:
pos_method,bearing_deg_true,surface_feature,observations,obs_positioned,obs_bearing_only,frame_first,frame_last,provenance.
pos_method is one of triangulated, ground_cluster, linear_run,
merged, value_merged, single_finding or unlocated, and it is on
every feature: a feature that could not be placed says unlocated rather
than sitting somewhere plausible. The
sample pack defines every field.
The public viewer does not export: its GeoJSON and CSV export controls are turned off on the public deployment, and the layers are not in the public extract at all. Layers reach you as a delivery, or as the sample layer on request.
What the numbers mean
The published reading figure is legible-value precision of 98.0% (245 of
250) on a seeded, reproducible stratified sample from the first surveyed
town, with a 95% confidence interval of 95.4% to 99.1%. It measures whether
values we claimed to read were read correctly, and nothing else.
conf_max_pct and conf_mean_pct say how sure a read was, not how right
it was.
What is not offered yet
- Positional accuracy is not measured. No figure has been measured
against survey-grade ground truth and none is published. Treat positions
as estimates labelled by
pos_method. - No recall figure. Precision says nothing about what a pass did not see.
- Change reporting between passes is in build. Until it ships, a re-survey is delivered as a fresh dated pass, not an automated difference.
- No statutory condition survey. Roadside is asset inventory and evidence; it is not a carriageway condition survey under PAS 2161, and we are not on the approved list. Open-pothole detection is undemonstrated.
- No coverage claim. We do not sell by area covered: what exists is what has been driven, and each pass says where it went.
- No published imagery by default. Publication of any imagery is decided in the data protection assessment and is not offered by default.
- No public API or self-serve access. Roadside is commissioned; start from the product page or talk to us.