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What are the differences between nautical charts and road maps?

What are the differences between nautical charts and road maps?
Nautical Charts Road Maps
Provide detailed information about hidden dangers so navigators don’t hit anything or run aground! Provide no information about the conditions of a road.
Are used by navigators to plot their own courses through open bodies of water and highly trafficked areas. Are reference guides that show predetermined routes like roads and highways.

Do show

  • aids to navigation, like buoys.
  • information about conditions like bridge heights and channel widths.
  • hydrographic information (details about a water bodies’ physical features) such as
    • water depths and shoreline limits;
    • tide predictions;
    • obstacles to navigation, like rocks and shipwrecks.

Don't show

  • traffic lights or signs.
  • information about conditions like bridge heights or road widths.

Do show geographic information, such as the political boundaries of cities, states, and countries.

Because nautical charts are so important to safe navigation, commercial vessels — vessels that travel the ocean professionally to ship products or fish commercially, for example — are required by law to have updated nautical charts on board. Commercial vehicles on land, like long-haul trucks, are not required by law to have updated road maps.
Person standing at a ship’s bridge console, monitoring navigation systems on multiple screens displaying electronic navigational charts, with a harbor visible through the windows.

An electronic navigational chart (ENC) displayed on an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) on NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson.