The Cheongna Sky Bridge (청라하늘대교) officially opened back in January (and was under construction for a long time before that). Now that we are in March, I thought it might be interesting to look at how it appears on some Korean versus foreign mapping services. There's really no point to this post, I was just curious about how quickly a major project would appear on each service.
Here it is on Naver Map, where they even have street view imagery of it already:
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| Cheongna Sky Bridge on Naver's base map |
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| Naver Map Road View imagery of the bridge |
Unsurprisingly they also have the navigation feature working for it:
Kakao Map shows it on the base map, but it doesn't appear at all on their satellite view. Navigation works though:
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| Kakao Map imagery as of 2026-3 |
Meanwhile, Google Maps weirdly has POI marker pins for various spots on the bridge, but no actual bridge visible in the main base map.
The satellite view shows a partial completion of the bridge which is understandable and forgivable but personally I find it strange that after all the hullabaloo over high quality map data, they haven't bothered in 2 months to update this pretty noteworthy piece of infrastructure.
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| Sky Bridge on Google Maps as of 2026-3 |
Google doesn't offer car navigation directions (yet) but the bus navigation is working and routes across the bridge:
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| Google Maps routing across the bridge |
Similarly, Apple Maps has it mostly complete on satellite view but missing entirely from the base map:
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| Sky Bridge on Apple Maps as of 2026-3 |
Open Street Map (OSM) as usual is pretty updated compared to the major players. They have the bridge on the base map including with driving directions:
I remember it took Google Maps nearly a year to have some new subway line extensions appear visually on the map tiles, even though it was able to route directions on the new lines not long after they came into service. Guess it takes time to generate new imagery and stitch it all together.
I'm always weirdly impressed with OSM coverage in Korea. There seems to be a pretty active community making updates to it. You could get by with using it for directions, although I probably wouldn't just because I like being warned which lanes and exits I need on the highway.
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