Collected from the feedback box and email. Most answers are one of two kinds — "that is what the data says" or "that is deliberate" — and each answer says which.
Two cases. If the footprint is missing from the 2D plates too, it is not yet in Overture Maps (whose footprints compile OpenStreetMap, Microsoft and Esri sources) — most often a recent completion. If it is in 2D but not in 3D, Overture has neither a height nor a floor count for it, and we do not invent one. See the Data sources page.
Buildings whose use or year built is not in the assessor data. Coverage differs by city and neighbourhood; the Data sources page gives the measured share per city. Grey is deliberate — a plausible colour would be a lie. A neighbourhood with a lot of grey often simply has a lot of new construction.
Ten panels use national sources and work anywhere in the US. Building age and building use come from county or city assessor rolls, which we join one jurisdiction at a time — currently New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle/King County, Massachusetts, Washington DC, Philadelphia, Miami-Dade and Chicago/Cook County. The cadastral and plot-size panels likewise appear only where a parcel layer is wired. The trees panel is New York only for now (see Trees).
Plates go to 1.5 km (about 0.9 mi); the wind simulation to 1 km. Beyond that a building becomes a dot inside the frame, and simulation cost grows with the cube of the radius. For a larger area, move the centre and make several plates.
You can switch the frame to a circle, square, 4:3 or 16:9. The circle is the default because it is the convention for site-analysis boards and, having no orientation, says "the site and its surroundings" most plainly.
Each panel has an accent colour. The ramp keeps its lightness and saturation and only the hue changes, so bands stay legible. Background greys — the right-of-way grey on the plot-size panel, for instance — do not follow the accent. For full control, download the SVG (SVG workflow).
Before 1 September 2026 that was our fault: the server finished, but a proxy in between dropped the connection at 100 seconds, so the browser saw a failure while the result landed in the cache. Start and status are now separate requests and the trap is gone. If you still see it, please tell us.
| 300 m radius | 800 m radius | |
|---|---|---|
| Wind simulation | ~30 s | ~3 min |
| Thermal comfort (with a wind result) | seconds | seconds to ~20 s |
| Sun hours | ~4 s | ~28 s |
| Diagram panels (each) | 0.2–2 s (sun-hours panel up to ~25 s) | |
The same site and settings come back instantly from cache. If several people compute at once you queue, and the sheet shows it. The first request in a US city outside New York can take two to three minutes while its base tile is built; if the screen gives up, reload — the tile will be ready.
When we fix the logic the cache version increments and the site is recomputed. Thermal comfort changed when tree shade was added; sun hours changed when the shadow function was unified. Each guide records when and why.
Use the separate "plate only" button: title, colour bar and caption are dropped; the site marker, compass and wind arrow stay. The default save keeps the caption on purpose — an unlabelled analysis image landing in a report is the failure this tool most wants to avoid. If you take the bare plate, caption it yourself.
The wind plan and 3D, the thermal-comfort and sun-hours maps are raster (pixel computations) and cannot be vectorised; the SVG button is disabled there and PNG is offered. The wind rose and all diagram panels export as SVG.
If you downloaded SKP, it opens by double-click or File ▸ Open, including in SketchUp Free. SKP files from before 3 September 2026 have flipped faces and render white — download again. The older DAE files do not open in Free at all and need File ▸ Import in Pro. Details in 3D export.
Filenames include the site, radius and settings (height for wind, colour mode for 3D), so changing a setting produces a new name. If your browser renames downloads, check its download settings.
Yes. The diagrams, SVG, DXF and 3D files can be used in reports, presentations, proposals and competition entries, including commercial work. Conditions are in the Terms, and advertising on the site does not change them.
Keep the source line under each plate (Overture Maps, OpenStreetMap contributors, USGS and so on). It is a condition of the underlying data — OSM-derived footprints carry the ODbL, whose share-alike clause applies if you redistribute a database, not an image — and it is what tells a reader the vintage and limits of what they are looking at. Crediting sitedia is not required.
No. Public data lags, elevation has errors, and buildings without heights are missing, so none of it is evidence for a regulatory finding. The sun-hours plate shows two reference criteria, but it measures the ground, not windows, and spots below missing buildings read brighter than reality. Use it for early layout decisions; do the determination with a survey and a validated tool.
No accounts, and no name or email is collected. The coordinates you query and the plates produced stay in a server cache so the next identical request is fast, but they are not linked to who asked. Visit statistics use an anonymous cookie. See the Privacy policy.
Yes — sitedia started in Korea and the Korean edition covers the whole country with 21 panels, including zoning and cadastral layers that have no US equivalent. The data is entirely different, so it runs as a separate site.
The feedback button at bottom right, or the email on the Contact page. Say which site (address or coordinates), which panel, and what differs. Errors in the source data are not ours to fix, but errors in our processing are — the "traps we hit" sections in the guides are that history.
The ingredients are all public data, so it seemed right to make the tool public too. Running costs are meant to be covered by advertising. If paid features appear, the diagram set and SVG export are intended to stay free.