EarthDefine Driveways maps the paved access surface between the public road and the structures it serves, and derives the point where that surface meets the edge of the road pavement. Both outputs come from the same pipeline that produces our building footprints, so the driveway polygon, its access point, and the structure it serves all line up against the same imagery.
The geometry is for measuring: impervious accounting, stormwater fee assessment, property characterization. The access point is for arriving: getting a vehicle, a driver, or a first responder to the right entrance rather than the middle of a parcel or a neighbor's curb cut.
Order either layer on its own, or both together.
Driveway Geometry. The full physical surface of the driveway as a vector polygon, with area, linked to the parcel and building footprint it serves. Use it when the question is how much surface there is, where it sits, and what it drains to.
Precision Access Points (PAP). A single point at the intersection of the private driveway and the public road edge, carrying coordinates and the address it belongs to. Use it when the question is where a vehicle should stop.
| Driveway Geometry | Precision Access Points | |
|---|---|---|
| Feature type | Polygon | Point |
| Answers | How much paved surface, and where | Where to enter the property |
| Typical buyers | Stormwater utilities, insurers, assessors, planners | Navigation, delivery, ride-hail, NG911, field service |
| Links to | Parcel, building footprint, address | Address, building footprint, parent driveway |
Parking Lots covers off-street parking areas. The Impervious Map is a combined raster of every paved surface in a scene. Driveways isolates the driveway itself, so you can measure it without separating it from the road, the lot, or the surrounding pavement. If you already license Impervious or Land Cover, Driveways is the feature-level breakout of a surface class you can currently only see in aggregate.
Observed rather than interpolated. Most access points in commercial datasets are estimated by dividing a road segment across its address range, or by averaging GPS traces from previous deliveries. We look at the pavement. Our models read the driveway off high-resolution aerial imagery and place the access point on the physical connection to the road.
Coverage that does not wait for traffic. Trace-based access points improve only where vehicles have already been, which leaves new subdivisions, seasonal addresses, and low-volume rural routes thin for years. Imagery gives us a first observation as soon as the imagery is captured, with no delivery history required.
Nothing to reconcile with your road network. Access points are delivered as coordinates with addresses attached. They snap onto whatever centerline graph you already use, and there is no competing network geometry to merge, conflate, or maintain.
Refreshed on our cycle, not the imagery cycle. New aerial imagery covers roughly half the contiguous US in a given year. We run production quarterly, pulling in new imagery, new LiDAR, and model improvements as they land, so an area of interest can improve between imagery flights.
Our internal benchmarking compares EarthDefine access points against access points interpolated from road networks and address ranges. Across audited samples, the median correction was:
The corrections cluster into two failure modes. The first is centroid drift, where the interpolated point lands somewhere in the parcel interior or at a parcel edge with no curb cut. The second is neighbor misattribution, where the interpolated point sits closer to the adjacent property's driveway than to the correct one, which is the error most likely to send a driver or a responder to the wrong door.
Figures reflect internal audits of sampled areas and are not a nationwide accuracy statement. Ask us for the audit methodology and the sample geographies.
Municipal stormwater utilities quantify driveway surface per parcel for impervious-area fee assessment, where driveways are frequently the largest uncounted private surface after the roof.
Property insurance and underwriting use driveway geometry for setback distance, site access, slope and runoff exposure, and to characterize properties without a site visit.
Navigation, ride-hail, and delivery resolve the last hundred feet, so the vehicle stops at the entrance rather than at an interpolated point on a parallel street or a neighboring parcel.
Emergency dispatch and NG911 route responders to a specific structural entrance, aligned with the NENA site and structure address point model for property access locations.
Field service and utilities plan truck access, service vehicle staging, and equipment placement before the crew arrives.
Driveway Geometry and Precision Access Points are available across the contiguous US, with completeness that varies by geography. Dense tree canopy, unpaved and shared driveways, and imagery older than the current cycle all reduce what we can extract in a given area, and we would rather tell you the coverage rate for your area of interest than average it into a single national number. Ask us and we will report measured completeness for the counties you care about, along with what our current production queue will add.
Where imagery is the limiting factor, we license additional imagery for areas undergoing change rather than waiting for the next public acquisition.
| Driveway Geometry | Precision Access Points | |
|---|---|---|
| Geometry | Polygon (vector) | Point |
| Formats | File Geodatabase, Shapefile, GeoJSON | File Geodatabase, Shapefile, GeoJSON, CSV |
| Coordinate system | EPSG:4326 (WGS 84) | EPSG:4326 (WGS 84) |
| Source | 60cm aerial imagery, with LiDAR where available | Derived from driveway geometry and road edge |
| Attributes | Area (sq ft), surface type, linked building ID, linked address | Latitude, longitude, address, linked building ID, parent driveway ID |
| Coverage | Contiguous US, varies by geography | Contiguous US, varies by geography |
| Refresh | Quarterly production cycle | Quarterly production cycle |
Driveways are the paved access surfaces between the road and a structure, delivered as individual polygons. Parking Lots covers off-street parking areas. The Impervious Map is a raster of all paved surfaces combined. Choose Driveways when you need the driveway as a discrete, parcel-linked feature.
No, and we will tell you the coverage rate for your area rather than quote a national figure. Extraction is limited by imagery age, tree canopy, and driveway surface type. Send us your area of interest and we will report measured completeness for it.
Trace-based access points get better where vehicles have already delivered, which works well in dense established neighborhoods and poorly everywhere else. Ours come from imagery, so a new subdivision or a rural route is covered on the first observation. The two approaches complement each other, and several customers use ours to fill the areas where trace density is low.
No. Access points are coordinates with addresses attached, with no road geometry included, so they attach to your centerline graph without changing it.
Access points are produced to align with the NENA site and structure address point model for property access locations. Talk to us about your specific schema requirements.
Samples are for evaluation only and cannot be redistributed, resold, or used in production without a license. Contact us for coverage, licensing, and pricing.
Tell us your area of interest and our data experts will report coverage for it, prepare a sample, and put together pricing.
