H3

Properties2

Type	Concept
Note created	Feb 17, 2025

H3 is a spatial index system developed by Uber that uses hexagons as a basic shape to its grid. The main advantage of this shape is that each cell’s centroid has the same distance to all of its neighbours, while other systems like Quadbins or triangle-based do not maintain this property. The main disadvantage is hierarchically traversing it, since an hexagon cannot be composed by other hexagons. For that reason, a point that lies close to the border of a bucket can have a different parent bucket than its cell’s centroid.

Cell statistics

All the data has been extracted from the H3 documentation.

Cell Counts

Res	Total number of cells	Number of hexagons	Number of pentagons
0	122	110	12
1	842	830	12
2	5,882	5,870	12
3	41,162	41,150	12
4	288,122	288,110	12
5	2,016,842	2,016,830	12
6	14,117,882	14,117,870	12
7	98,825,162	98,825,150	12
8	691,776,122	691,776,110	12
9	4,842,432,842	4,842,432,830	12
10	33,897,029,882	33,897,029,870	12
11	237,279,209,162	237,279,209,150	12
12	1,660,954,464,122	1,660,954,464,110	12
13	11,626,681,248,842	11,626,681,248,830	12
14	81,386,768,741,882	81,386,768,741,870	12
15	569,707,381,193,162	569,707,381,193,150	12

Cell areas (m2)

Res	Average Hexagon Area (m2)	Pentagon Area* (m2)
0	4,357,449,416,078.392	2,562,182,162,955.496
1	609,788,441,794.134	328,434,586,246.469
2	86,801,780,398.997	44,930,898,497.879
3	12,393,434,655.088	6,315,472,267.516
4	1,770,347,654.491	896,582,383.141
5	252,903,858.182	127,785,583.023
6	36,129,062.164	18,238,749.548
7	5,161,293.360	2,604,669.397
8	737,327.598	372,048.038
9	105,332.513	53,147.195
10	15,047.502	7,592.318
11	2,149.643	1,084.609
12	307.092	154.944
13	43.870	22.135
14	6.267	3.162
15	0.895	0.452