freakmaps.com
I wanted to see the bigger picture. Not street level — country level. How does Poland's railway network compare to Germany? Where are motorways being built right now? What does an entire country's tram network look like in one view?
I couldn't find a tool that showed me that. So I built RailsMaps, then FreakMaps.
I'm an infrastructure enthusiast. I follow railway and motorway projects in Poland obsessively — proposals, timelines, what's under construction, what's just political noise. OSM reflects this accurately enough, and the community behind it is remarkable.
FreakMaps is where I put everything beyond rail — motorways, expressways, cities, connectivity and geography. Things I'm curious about, visualised the way I want to see them.
— Banasik
All map data comes from OpenStreetMap (OSM) — a collaborative, open-data project maintained by a global community of over 10 million contributors. OSM data is available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).
Motorway and road data uses tags such as highway=motorway, highway=trunk and related attributes for speed (maxspeed), lanes (lanes) and construction status. City and town data uses place=city and place=town nodes with population and area attributes.
Map tiles and underlying data are regenerated daily from the latest OpenStreetMap planet extract. Newly mapped motorway sections, corrected geometries and updated city data typically appear on FreakMaps within 24–48 hours of being committed to OSM.
Raw OSM data is processed through a pipeline that extracts road and settlement features, classifies them by type, and renders them as vector map tiles. Motorways and expressways are categorised by speed limit, lane count, link/ramp structure and construction status. Cities and towns are classified by population, area, population density and connectivity to transport infrastructure.
Connectivity metrics — railway access, motorway access and combined infrastructure connectivity — are calculated based on proximity to the nearest transport node (station, motorway junction) relative to settlement area. Region boundaries follow ISO 3166-1/2 country and subdivision codes.
FreakMaps covers 200+ countries and regions across all continents, with two main map categories:
Map completeness and accuracy depend on OpenStreetMap contributor activity in each region. European motorway networks and city data tend to be very well mapped; some regions may have incomplete speed, lane or population data. Where attributes are missing, features appear without that classification. FreakMaps displays what OSM contributors have mapped; it does not fill gaps or infer missing values.
RailsMaps — interactive maps for mainline railways, metro, tram, light rail, narrow gauge and monorail networks worldwide. Also built on OpenStreetMap data, also updated daily. Explore rail networks filtered by speed, electrification, track gauge and usage.