I got tired of hand-drawing every road, so I built a tool that does it for me

I've been drafting in 2D AutoCAD for about ten years, mostly make-ready and utility work. If you've done any of it, you know the drill. A project lands on your desk, and before you can do any real engineering, you spend half a day tracing roads off Google Earth, dropping in parcel lines, typing out addresses, and roughing in building footprints. Every single job. Same boring setup work, over and over.

I kept thinking, this data already exists. The county has the parcels. OpenStreetMap has the roads. The Census has addresses. Somebody has the buildings. Why am I redrawing all of it by hand?

So I started messing around at night after work. I'm not a real developer. I know enough Python to be dangerous and a lot of trial and error. But I figured it out, and now there's a website I use on basically every project. It's called RoadDXF.

What it does

You go to roaddxf.com, draw a box around the area you care about, and click export. You get a DXF with:

• Road geometry on its own layer
• Parcel polygons with APNs and situs addresses as text
• Address points from OSM and Census TIGER
• Building footprints
• Railways, waterways, and a few other layers depending on what's there

Open it in AutoCAD. Everything's already on its own layer. No tracing, no typing addresses, no guessing at property lines. You start the actual work.

First three exports are free, no credit card up front. After that it's a small subscription that keeps the servers running and pays for the time I spend hunting down new county data. I built it because I needed it, and a small sub is the only way I can keep the lights on without selling out to anyone or stuffing it with ads.

It's a draft, not a deliverable

One thing to be straight about. RoadDXF exports are a starting draft, not a finished drawing. Public map data isn't perfect, and you'll still trim overhangs, connect gaps, and tune labels. Those are the parts that need a drafter's eye. What used to take hours of hand-drawing now takes minutes of cleanup, and the cleanup is the part you're actually getting paid to do anyway.

The boring part that took the longest

The fun part is the map. The hard part is parcel data. There are over 3,000 counties in the US, and every one of them does it differently. Some publish a clean ArcGIS service. Some hide it behind a token. Some have boundaries but no addresses. Some have addresses but no boundaries. A few don't publish anything at all and you have to use the data they sell to title companies.

I've spent more nights than I want to admit hunting down parcel services county by county. Sometimes the data is hiding in a weird place. Take New Mexico. I burned almost a week trying to find a statewide parcel layer. Tried the tax office, the assessors, the GIS coordinator, dead end after dead end. I eventually stumbled into the Office of the State Engineer, which is the water people. They had it. All 33 counties, every parcel, every address, sitting on a public ArcGIS server because they need it for water rights work. New Mexico went from a broken patchwork of county services to a clean statewide layer in one afternoon.

Other times you do everything right and there's still no door in. Oregon is the one that bugs me. The state launched a Statewide Parcels Initiative back in September 2023 through their Geospatial Enterprise Operations office, with the stated goal of publishing one clean statewide dataset anyone could use. Almost three years later the dataset technically exists, and you can even see it through the official ORMAP viewer, but the actual service endpoint is locked behind a permissions wall. If you're not inside the Oregon GEOHub organization, you get a 403 and a closed door. So close.

Some Oregon counties also treat their parcel data as a product. Tillamook charges $1,500 for the initial shapefile and another $400 a year for updates. I worked around that one because the county had quietly published a public AGOL service years earlier that nobody seemed to notice, but that's the exception, not the rule. The four counties I still can't get are different flavors of stuck. Wheeler contracts their GIS work out to Harney County, and Harney sells maps by email after you contact them for a quote. Wallowa publishes parcel data, but they stuff all the attributes inside HTML popup snippets, which a normal map service can't read. Baker has a service but it's just polygon shapes with no APN and no address, basically blank lots. Union County's GIS server has been unreachable every time I've checked.

As of right now, the site covers about 89% of the US population. 38 states are fully statewide, meaning any county in those states will pull real parcel data. The rest are metro by metro, and there's a coverage map on the homepage that's honest about what's covered and what's not. If a county is red on the map, it means I tried and the county doesn't publish queryable data. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Who it's for

If you're a drafter doing make-ready, utility design, pole loading, right-of-way exhibits, site surveys, or honestly any 2D AutoCAD work where the base data eats half your day, this is for you. I've shown it to a few people in the industry and the reaction is usually some variation of "wait, that's it? draw a box?"

That's it. Draw a box.

Why I'm writing this

Because I know there are thousands of you out there doing the same hand-drawing I was doing, on the same kinds of projects, with the same Friday afternoon dread when a new job lands. You don't need a sales call. You don't need a contract or a demo. You need a DXF. First three are on me, and if it saves you time the sub is cheap enough that one job pays for the year.