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Curvy roads in North Africa and the Gulf

· 2 min read
Massimo Di Stefano
Massimo Di Stefano
FastGIS author

The curvy roads search used to stop at the Mediterranean. Ask it for roads near the Tizi n'Tichka and it found nothing. Now it finds the N9 over the pass, the RP2016 and RP1506 beside it, and the unnamed mountain roads in between.

Eight more regions​

We score curvature ourselves, from OpenStreetMap, the same way in every country. Until today that covered the 36 European regions. Now it also covers Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Mauritania, Senegal and the Gambia, Algeria, Libya and the Gulf states: 88,000 more road sections, about 1.07 million in all.

The new roads were scored with the same settings as Europe's and added beside them, so nothing in Europe moved. They carry what a European road carries:

  • the climb, from the same 30 m elevation model;
  • the distance to water;
  • the population along the road;
  • the scenic routes where OpenStreetMap maps one, such as the Route de la Kabylie.

Where you see them​

  • Find Curvy Roads, on the phone and on the desktop.
  • The curvature layer, the map's blue-to-red colouring of every road by its turning per kilometre.
  • The offline curvature tiles a phone downloads for a country.
  • The library's catalogue, where curvy roads are searchable records.

The N9 over the Tichka is one road of 131 km. It climbs from 720 m to 2,210 m.

One thing to know​

The Twisty and Mixed presets skip a road that passes a densely populated stretch. In Morocco almost every long road passes a village, so near the Tichka Twisty lists the unnamed passes but not the N9 itself. Raise the population limit and it is there. We are looking at a better rule.