[HN Gopher] City Roads - Draw all roads in a city at once
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City Roads - Draw all roads in a city at once
Author : jordinebot
Score : 211 points
Date : 2020-01-22 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anvaka.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (anvaka.github.io)
| glitcher wrote:
| Awesome project, love the output!
|
| My wishlist item would be to have an option to render an
| additional x miles around the city limits boundaries to help
| incorporate communities that have the same city in their address
| but are technically not within the city limits.
| movablepoint wrote:
| Nice work! Easy to use (and fast).
|
| Reminds me of this print I still have on my wall called "All
| Streets Limited" by Ben Fry.
| anvaka wrote:
| Thank you!
| ajsharp wrote:
| This is incredibly cool. Cheers.
| anvaka wrote:
| Thank you !
| chadlavi wrote:
| Huh, didn't find my hometown somehow. Dies this only work for
| cities over a certain size?
| anvaka wrote:
| If you are able to find your town here
| https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ - and the osm type for the
| found place is "relationship" not node - it should work.
|
| We are trying to find a fallback for `node` types here
| https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/issues/7 - we basically
| don't have accurate city boundaries for nodes.
| jdboyd wrote:
| It's really simple looking, but I entered my city, and I just
| love the graphic that was rendered. Is there any chance of making
| it produce SVGs to download?
| parekhnish wrote:
| Yes, but it is (as of this moment) an experimental feature. Add
| "?svg=1" to the end of the URL to enable this feature [0].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/issues/4
| anticensor wrote:
| I misread it as the website that _tenders_ every single road
| within a city.
| seaish wrote:
| Apparently it can't load all of California, but other than that,
| this is really cool.
| anvaka wrote:
| Locally it is limited by ram, video card capabilities. Remotely
| it depends on overpass turbo API being able to process huge
| request s. Which error do you see?
| ademars94 wrote:
| It would be really neat to be able to set a custom resolution to
| render as a .png image. Like e.g. if somebody wanted to create a
| poster.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| It's definitely missing a lot of roads in my city.
|
| Compare it's view to Beaverton, Oregon:
| https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/?q=Beaverton%2C%20OR&are...
|
| With the Google Maps view:
| https://www.google.com/maps/@45.5029349,-122.8365195,13.75z
|
| It's like most of the Cedar Hills neighborhood doesn't exist. It
| also drew a line for a power line where there is no road.
| jmkb wrote:
| OpenStreetMap's definition of Beaverton is quite complicated:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/423111 It includes
| several cut-outs for neighborhoods (including Cedar Hills) and
| other features. I'd guess that the OSM mappers were trying to
| represent a particular legal definition of the Beaverton city
| limits. How accurate it is, I wouldn't know.
|
| Perhaps in situations like this, "City Roads" might consider
| ignoring the cut-out enclaves and just using the mulipolygon's
| outer boundaries.
|
| The power line showing up as a road is a mystery. If you can
| locate the corresponding feature on OSM you might want to
| investigate it. (There may in fact be a road or trail of some
| sort, though -- it's common for powerlines to have a track for
| maintenance vehicles.)
| maxerickson wrote:
| The boundary was initially imported from US Census Bureau
| data, which frequently does attempt to follow actual
| administrative boundaries.
|
| The source data tends to not be incredibly accurate.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| There's definitely a little bit of fuckery regarding
| Beaverton's borders.
|
| My mailing address is in Beaverton, but OSM thinks it's
| Aloha. My zip code according to the post office is 97003, but
| some map software rejects it as non-existent, or forces a
| change to 97006.
|
| OSM's Portland borders also definitely don't match what
| mailing addresses are there. I used to live in apartments off
| of NW 185th near US-26, which most people would call
| Beaverton, but my mailing address was Portland, but I was at
| least 4 miles from anywhere people would actually call
| Portland.
|
| I wonder how common these confusing city limits are in other
| metro areas.
| KingMachiavelli wrote:
| What OSM shows as matching the relation to the city is very
| strange. The boundary is so folded that I can't tell which
| parts are inside and which parts are very carefully excluded...
| If you look at other cities vs yours on OSM you'll see that it
| looks like most of Cedar Hills is excluded on OSM or rather the
| roads are their but it doesn't consider them part of the city.
|
| Denver, CO: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/253750
|
| Beaverton, Oregon:
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/423111
| anvaka wrote:
| Hey there, I'm the author of the tool!
|
| Just wanted to thank you for the comments, feedback and shares! I
| 'm very happy!
|
| PS: If you liked that project you may find my other stuff
| interesting:
| https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Aanvaka%20min_retweets%3A... -
| it's just a hobby but I love it :D
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I don't know if open street data let's you monetize like this,
| but consider adding a link to Shutterfly or some similar site
| that would let the user get their road network of choice be
| printed out on a mug or t shirt.
|
| A site featured on hn a few weeks ago which showed height
| renderings of various locales let you do something like that.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| OpenStreetMap data license (ODBL) allows any use of
| renderings as long as attribution is present, and that
| modifications to the data have been made available under
| ODBL.
| tnorthcutt wrote:
| That one is also from anvaka :)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Funny. I wonder if the similar visual styles led me to
| connect the two despite not even remembering what exactly
| the terrain height mapping one was.
|
| Now I feel kind of silly suggesting to this person a great
| idea that was actually...their own.
| cglace wrote:
| Do you remember the site that was submitted?
| jesterpm wrote:
| Peak map: Visualize the elevation of any area using a
| ridgeline chart
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21968874
| anvaka wrote:
| Oh! This one is fun :)!
| jschwartzi wrote:
| Bonus points if you let me add UTM or Lat+Long
| coordinates to have marks appear for the peaks I've
| bagged on the peak map. Then I can buy a mug or print a
| poster that lists all the peaks I've bagged or intend to
| bag.
| windthrown wrote:
| This is already incorporated into the site. After the roads
| render, click "Customize", then "Onto a mug" and a link to
| zazzle.com will open to order a mug.
| ym705 wrote:
| Your projects are awesome anvaka! Please continue doing those!
| anvaka wrote:
| Sincerely thank you. I'm so happy to know this!
| bduerst wrote:
| Well done. If possible, can you add functionality for:
|
| - Pre-saved color swatches to cycle through, like those at
| color.adobe.com/trends
|
| - Custom cell phone cases. A bunch like casetify offer
| affiliate revenue.
| iagovar wrote:
| It's pretty cool mate. Gonna make a wallpaper with it.
| anvaka wrote:
| Yay! I'd love to know how it goes! I'm myself not sure what
| would be the best resolution and line thickness to do
| wallpapers. If you find something appealing - please share?
| pfundstein wrote:
| Tokyo (massive map) seems a bit buggy, and there's several
| distinct groups of roads loading. Awesome tool nonetheless!
| jolmg wrote:
| It seems they're islands that are also part of Tokyo.
| From[1]:
|
| > Also within the administrative boundaries of Tokyo
| Metropolis are two island chains in the Pacific Ocean
| directly south: the Izu Islands, and the Ogasawara Islands
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo
| dvasdekis wrote:
| Typed in 'Brisbane', an Australian city of 3 million, but the
| only result that came up was Brisbane, Santa Monica.
|
| Any thoughts on international support? :)
| anvaka wrote:
| I see that it is defined as `node` in osm:
| https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/details.php?place_id=164...
|
| We need `relationship` osm type to get the boundaries...
|
| There is an ongoing discussion on the repository to give a
| better fallback: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/issues/7
| subterrane wrote:
| It renders footways as roads so don't use this while driving. :D
| Treblemaker wrote:
| Would love to find something like this for rural areas. Maddening
| sometimes how details disappear from most online maps based only
| on zoom level rather than on feature density.
| anvaka wrote:
| as long as there is openstreetmap data for it It should work
| for rural areas as well :)
| MacKay wrote:
| was able to do Cape Breton Island [1], maps look really nice!
|
| [1]: https://i.imgur.com/I7q7Ttv.png
| londons_explore wrote:
| Did you compare to a regular old canvas doing path calls?
|
| Or SVG?
|
| Most web browsers these days should GPU accelerate line drawing,
| making the whole lot one single openGL/directX/vulkan api call.
|
| If it doesn't perform equivalently, it's really a browser bug,
| and ought to be fixed.
| izzydata wrote:
| My neighborhood was non-existant between the two cities that end
| on both sides of it.
| keyle wrote:
| Export to something printable would be really neat. The export to
| PNG is cute but it's 2K wide, not useful for anything but
| potentially a desktop background.
| c0nsumer wrote:
| Neat, but this does not seem to be all roads, it seems to be
| everything tagged highway=*.
|
| Specifically, non-motorized walking/biking paths and mountain
| bike trails (highway=path) are rendered.
|
| Ref: https://anvaka.github.io/city-
| roads/?q=Marquette%2C%20MI&are...
| jlv2 wrote:
| In my case, I noticed many driveways were rendered when I did
| my town.
| fralewsmi wrote:
| Same here, was interested to see it was only certain suburbs
| which had the driveways mapped.
| anvaka wrote:
| Do you guys think it would be worth removing the foot
| paths? Someone here proposes to remove them altogether:
| https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/issues/3 - I'm not
| sure yet which direction would make more sense?
| chillly wrote:
| The site times out, YC has struck.
|
| It says it is contacting openstreetmaps, but the global mapping
| community is called openstreetmap (no 's').
| anvaka wrote:
| Will fix the name! Thanks for catching
| tantalor wrote:
| Can I play Pac-Man on it?
| crazygringo wrote:
| I love how elegant it is!
|
| Unfortunately it can't seem to find most cities I try. Just one
| example, typing "New Hartford" only finds one in Iowa, instead of
| listing all of them [1]. Most other medium-sized towns I tried
| show no results at all.
|
| I'd also love it if there were a way to export as SVG's -- these
| seem like they would make amazing posters to frame.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hartford
| anvaka wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I checked here
| https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=New+Hartfor...
| - looks like all other `New Hartford` have type "node" in the
| database, which doesn't give boundaries of the cities.
|
| We are thinking about fallback here:
| https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/issues/7 but what might
| work better in short term: try entering a county name, and then
| zoom in onto the place. It is not as convenient as having a
| city boundaries, sorry about that.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Ah the counties work great! Never even would have occurred to
| me. And honestly, for many medium-sized towns, the county is
| more intuitive boundary anyways.
|
| Since it's not clear you could search by county, may I
| suggest including that as a tip or something? Otherwise it
| gives the impression the site is broken somehow.
| ppod wrote:
| Very nice, customisable colours for water and different land
| types would be great.
| ohlookabird wrote:
| It looks great, but is the rendering of the OSM data the main
| thing or am I overlooking a feature here?
| Mathnerd314 wrote:
| from the GitHub: "beautiful art"
|
| I think the main feature is buying the rendering as a coffee
| mug.
| anvaka wrote:
| Lol
|
| I hope it has more potential than art, though art in itself
| is very strong and inspirational thing!
|
| For example, one could use this tool to debug missing areas
| in OSM. You could also use it as a source of large natural
| graphs to study network flow, deseas propgation, etc.
|
| Finally it could also be used for educational purposes: you
| could show various graph algorithms on this data with
| something more realistic than abstract graphs :)
| irrational wrote:
| I did my city. Lots of streets (that are decades old) are not on
| there, including the street that my house is on (which has been
| there since at least 1970). Other streets cut out and then pick
| back up a half mile or so later. What happened to the road in
| between those two points?
| krzyk wrote:
| I see an empty page when I enter my city (after it downloads it,
| I disabled uBlock but that didn't change anything) :(
| anvaka wrote:
| Interesting! What's the city name?
| anon767 wrote:
| My Girlfriend is an architect and she finds this tool great :)
| She asks if it would be possible to export these maps as .dwg
| file
| maxerickson wrote:
| The data is coming from OpenStreetMap, via http://overpass-
| api.de/
|
| It's kind of overwhelming, but there's all sorts of tools that
| can take OSM data and do something with it.
| oxplot wrote:
| Export to svg as explained in another comment, open with
| inkscape and export to dwg.
| werber wrote:
| Unable to export to png in Safari on iPhone xs
| exdsq wrote:
| It's interesting to see how some cities are spread out. For
| instance, Aleppo is pretty interesting in that it has clusters of
| compact streets growing out of the center.
| thunderbong wrote:
| Beautiful! I tried it with quite a few cities. Most of the cities
| hardly look as if they were planned out!
|
| A few from the Wikipedia list [0] looks nice though.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_cities
|
| Quezon City: https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/?q=Quezon
| City&areaId=3600106569
|
| Chandigarh: https://anvaka.github.io/city-
| roads/?q=Chandigarh&areaId=360...
|
| Singapore: https://anvaka.github.io/city-
| roads/?q=Singapore&areaId=3600...
| ksbakan wrote:
| Wow this thing is fast!
|
| I expected lag on my phone but it works great.
| dvtrn wrote:
| Yeah I was genuinely blown away by how fast this rendered every
| street in Chicago on mobile, a very side-street dense city.
| anvaka wrote:
| thank you :)!
| sethammons wrote:
| > Something went wrong. The error was:
|
| > { "statusError": 504, "message": "Unexpected status code 504
| when calling https://overpass.openstreetmap.ru/cgi/interpreter" }
|
| And the referenced url 404s
| asdasdasdasdwd wrote:
| Try a smaller city. This rendered almost immediately for me:
| https://anvaka.github.io/city-roads/?q=La%20Plata%2C%20Argen...
| sethammons wrote:
| Now the site is not loading at all for me. Oops, there it
| goes. I think it could be overwhelmed.
|
| I think it just does not have data on smaller towns and
| cities. I've tried several US smaller cities and nothing
| works. However, your link does. I can get San Diego and
| Irvine, CA. But I can't get Redlands or Yucaipa, CA. I can't
| get Polson, MT (nor Kalispell nor Helena).
|
| Edit: Update - Finally got some data on Polson, MT.
| anvaka wrote:
| Sorry it takes so long sometimes! I assume overpass (the
| back end that gives data) may experience higher loads which
| would affect response time! But glad it finally worked!
| anvaka wrote:
| To fetch the roads I use overpass turbo API. They are
| sometimes slow and timeout and sometimes limit amount of
| requests that we can send. So I found three endpoints of
| overpass turbo and rotate between them: in case when one
| fails I go to the next one. If none was able to handle the
| request, I bail out and show the error.
|
| That said, I also cached 3,000 cities with population over
| 100k citizens and try the cache first, before going to
| overpass. That may be the reason why it is fast in some cases
| and slow in others.
|
| By the way if someone has more stable/fast overpass endpoints
| - I will be happy to add them to the list!
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Try a smaller city. This rendered almost immediately for me_
|
| I tried Sandy Valley, Nevada. Doesn't get much smaller than
| that.
|
| Unexpected status code 504 when calling
| https://overpass.openstreetmap.ru/cgi/interpreter
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(page generated 2020-01-22 23:00 UTC)