How does H3 handle hierarchical zooming?
H3 tiles the planet at 16 precision levels, each nested inside the previous one. A location's coordinates hash to a high-precision cell ID; stripping digits from the end of the string ID gives the parent cell at coarser zoom, enabling region queries (surge pricing, delivery zones) without re-hashing.
Answered in
Why Uber Tiles the Planet in HexagonsHexagons with equidistant neighbors replace lat/long trigonometry with O(1) table lookups for finding nearby drivers and calculating surge pricing.
Read the full analysisOther questions this article answers
More system design questions
- Why doesn't Google just run Dijkstra faster?
- What is a shortcut edge and when is it precomputed?
- How much space do shortcut edges take compared to the original graph?
- Can Contraction Hierarchies handle dynamic graphs like traffic or road closure?
- Why contract low-degree nodes first instead of high-degree ones?
- What is a CRDT and why does it matter for real-time collaboration?
- How do CRDTs handle concurrent edits without a central server referee?
- Why did Figma move from operational transforms to CRDTs?
Every answer on Crashtech is written by the editor of the article it comes from — never auto-summarised. Browse all answers or the System Design beat.