Author: gboeing

Categories
Planning

Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility

I’m a co-author of a new article, “A Generalized Framework for Measuring Pedestrian Accessibility around the World Using Open Data,” which has just been published by Geographical Analysis. We developed an open source, containerized software framework for modeling pedestrian networks using open data to analyze disaggregate access to daily living needs. We worked with local partners in 25 cities around the world to demonstrate and validate this toolkit.

From the abstract:

Pedestrian accessibility is an important factor in urban transport and land use policy and critical for creating healthy, sustainable cities. Developing and evaluating indicators measuring inequalities in pedestrian accessibility can help planners and policymakers benchmark and monitor the progress of city planning interventions. However, measuring and assessing indicators of urban design and transport features at high resolution worldwide to enable city comparisons is challenging due to limited availability of official, high quality, and comparable spatial data, as well as spatial analysis tools offering customizable frameworks for indicator construction and analysis. To address these challenges, this study develops an open source software framework to construct pedestrian accessibility indicators for cities using open and consistent data. It presents a generalized method to consistently measure pedestrian accessibility at high resolution and spatially aggregated scale, to allow for both within- and between-city analyses. The open source and open data methods developed in this study can be extended to other cities worldwide to support local planning and policymaking. The software is made publicly available for reuse in an open repository.

For more, check out the article.

Categories
Data

OSMnx v1.1 Released

OSMnx v1.1.0 has been released. It includes several new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. I encourage you to upgrade and take advantage of everything new. I’ll summarize some of the key improvements in this post.

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Categories
Planning

Robert Moses Responds to Robert Caro

In 1974, Robert Caro published The Power Broker, a critical biography of Robert Moses’s dictatorial tenure as the “master builder” of mid-century New York. Moses profoundly transformed New York’s urban fabric and transportation system, producing the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Westside Highway, the Cross-Bronx Expressway, the Lincoln Center, the UN headquarters, Shea Stadium, Jones Beach State Park and many other projects. However, The Power Broker did lasting damage to his public image and today he remains one of the most controversial figures in city planning history.

Today, The Power Broker may be the most well-known biography of any urban planner ever. Less-known: on August 26, 1974, Moses issued a turgid 23-page statement denouncing Caro’s work as “full of mistakes, unsupported charges, nasty baseless personalities, and random haymakers.” Moses’s original typewritten statement survives today as a grainy photocopy in the New York City Parks Department archive. To better preserve and disseminate it, I extracted and transcribed its text using optical character recognition and edited the result to correct errors. My transcription of Moses’s statement, alongside Caro’s response to it, is available here.

Categories
Data

Worldwide Street Network Models and Indicators

My article, “Street Network Models and Indicators for Every Urban Area in the World” has been published by Geographical Analysis. This project was a massive undertaking and I’m excited to share it. As you might guess from the title, I modeled and analyzed the street network of each urban area in the world then deposited all the source code and models and indicators in open repositories for public reuse. The article also includes a high-level analysis of urban street network form across the world.

Cities worldwide exhibit a variety of street patterns and configurations that shape human mobility, equity, health, and livelihoods. Using boundaries derived from the Global Human Settlement Layer, I modeled and analyzed the street networks of every urban area in the world using OSMnx and OpenStreetMap raw data. In total, I modeled over 160 million street network nodes and over 320 million edges across 8,914 urban areas in 178 countries. I attached node elevations and street grades to every node/edge in the final models. All the final models were topologically simplified such that nodes represent intersections and dead-ends, and edges represent the street segments linking them.

Street network topology simplification with OSMnx and OpenStreetMap

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Categories
Data

GIS and Computational Notebooks

I have a new chapter “GIS and Computational Notebooks,” co-authored with Dani Arribas-Bel, out now in The Geographic Information Science & Technology Body of Knowledge. Want to make your spatial analyses more reproducible, portable, and well-documented? Our chapter is a short, gentle intro to using code and notebooks for modern GIS work.

Science and analytics both struggle with reproducibility, documentation, and portability. But GIS in both research and practice particularly suffers from these problems due to some of its unique characteristics. Our chapter discusses this challenge and its urgency for building better and more actionable knowledge from geospatial data. Then we introduce an emerging solution, the computational notebook, using Jupyter as our central example to illustrate what it does and how it works.

Jupyter notebook JupyterLab user interface

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Categories
Data

OSMnx 1.0 Is Here

Happy new year! After five years of development and over 2,000 code commits from dozens of contributors, OSMnx v1.0 has officially been released. This has been a long labor of love and I’m thrilled to see it reach this milestone.

Much has changed in recent months with new features added and a few things deprecated. Most of this development occurred in a major overhaul over the summer, which I covered at the time in three previous posts. Among these dozens of enhancements were major speed and efficiency improvements throughout the package, better visualization, a new geometries module for retrieving any geospatial objects from OSM, topological intersection consolidation, and much more. I encourage you to read those posts to familiarize yourself with what’s new.

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Categories
Urban

Urban Form and OpenStreetMap

My chapter “Exploring Urban Form Through OpenStreetMap Data: A Visual Introduction” has just been published in the new book Urban Experience and Design: Contemporary Perspectives on Improving the Public Realm edited by Justin Hollander and Ann Sussman.

From the abstract:

This chapter introduces OpenStreetMap—a crowdsourced, worldwide mapping project and geospatial data repository—to illustrate its usefulness in quickly and easily analyzing and visualizing planning and design outcomes in the built environment. It demonstrates the OSMnx toolkit for automatically downloading, modeling and visualizing spatial data from OpenStreetMap. We explore patterns and configurations in street networks and buildings around the world computationally through visualization methods—including figure-ground diagrams and polar histograms—that help compress urban complexity into comprehensible artifacts that reflect the human experience of the built environment. Ubiquitous urban data and computation can open up new urban form analyses from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives.

For more, check out the chapter.

Categories
Planning

Off the Grid… and Back Again?

My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns. In this post I discuss these findings and visualizations across the US today as well as over time, then discuss my analysis methods.

Map of where street grids exist today across the US, made with OSMnx and Python

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Categories
Academia

Geospatial Tool Building

My new article “The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building” has been published in Transactions in GIS (free PDF). I originally presented this paper as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG annual meeting last year. I argue that tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. Better tools and data models, spearheaded by academics, can help infuse theory into our field’s quantitative work where it is too often lacking. But if we want better tools, we have to build them. It is not ESRI’s job to satisfy all the theoretical needs of the spatial sciences.

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Categories
Data

OSMnx Summer Wrap-Up

OSMnx underwent a major overhaul this summer, with the development of several new features, improvements, and optimizations. This project concluded yesterday with the release of v0.16.0.

This post briefly summarizes what’s changed since the previous mid-summer updates. It covers the new k shortest paths solver, auto-selecting the first polygon when geocoding, better conversion of graph types, and the new geometries module that lets you flexibly download any OSM geospatial objects as a geopandas GeoDataFrame.

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