Every Road on Earth, on One Map

The science

How do you map every road on Earth? For a long time, you couldn't – global road maps were outdated and patchy. Then the Global Roads Inventory Project set out to fix that, gathering and harmonizing nearly 60 separate geospatial datasets from governments, research institutes, NGOs and crowd-sourcing efforts into a single, consistent global roads dataset. It was assembled by researchers at the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and Radboud University for use in global environmental and biodiversity models.

Roads are the arteries of the modern world: they carry human mobility and move most of what we produce and consume. They are also one of the biggest drivers of habitat fragmentation – which is exactly why environmental scientists needed to map them so carefully.

How we turned it into a print

We drew each road as a single line observed from above – nothing else. And something remarkable happens: because people build roads wherever they live, the map mirrors a map of humanity itself. The continents fill in, coastlines emerge, and the empty places – deserts, ice, deep forest – stay blank. Road networks now divide the Earth's land into more than 500,000 separate pieces, and that number keeps rising.

The print

Part of our Minimal collection, The World as Roads is printed on premium paper in 70x50 cm and 100x70 cm – a minimalist portrait of the world built entirely from roads. Data source: Meijer et al., Global Roads Inventory Project (GRIP), globio.info.