Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
OSMnx can now download street network elevation data for anywhere in the world. In one line of code it downloads the elevation in meters of each network node, and in one more line of code it can calculate every street (i.e., edge) grade. Here is the complete street network of San Francisco, California, with nodes colored according to their elevation:
Check out the journal article about OSMnx. This is a summary of some of my recent research on making OpenStreetMap data analysis easy for urban planners. It was also published on the ACSP blog.
OpenStreetMap – a collaborative worldwide mapping project inspired by Wikipedia – has emerged in recent years as a major player both for mapping and acquiring urban spatial data. Though coverage varies somewhat worldwide, its data are of high quality and compare favorably to CIA World Factbook estimates and US Census TIGER/Line data. OpenStreetMap imported the TIGER/Line roads in 2007 and since then its community has made numerous corrections and improvements. In fact, many of these additions go beyond TIGER/Line’s scope, including for example passageways between buildings, footpaths through parks, bike routes, and detailed feature attributes such as finer-grained street classifiers, speed limits, etc.
This presents a fantastic data source to help answer urban planning questions, but OpenStreetMap’s data has been somewhat difficult to work with due to its Byzantine query language and coarse-grained bulk extracts provided by third parties. As part of my dissertation, I developed a tool called OSMnx that allows researchers to download street networks and building footprints for any city name, address, or polygon in the world, then analyze and visualize them. OSMnx democratizes these data and methods to help technical and non-technical planners and researchers use OpenStreetMap data to study urban form, circulation networks, accessibility, and resilience.
Check out the journal article about OSMnx.
I previously demonstrated how to create figure-ground square-mile visualizations of urban street networks with OSMnx to consistently compare city patterns, design paradigms, and connectivity. OSMnx downloads, analyzes, and visualizes street networks from OpenStreetMap but it can also get building footprints. If we mash-up these building footprints with the street networks, we get a fascinating comparative window into urban form:
This is a guide for absolute beginners to get started using Python. Since releasing OSMnx a few weeks ago, I’ve received a lot of comments from people who would love to try it out, but don’t know where to begin with Python. I’ll demonstrate how to get Python up and running on your system, how to install packages, and how to run code.
Check out the journal article about OSMnx. All figures in this article come from this journal article, which you can read/cite for more.
The heart of Allan Jacobs’ classic book on street-level urban form and design, Great Streets, features dozens of hand-drawn figure-ground diagrams in the style of Nolli maps. Each depicts one square mile of a city’s street network. Drawing these cities at the same scale provides a revealing spatial objectivity in visually comparing their street networks and urban forms.
We can recreate these visualizations automatically with Python and the OSMnx package, which I developed as part of my dissertation. With OSMnx we can download a street network from OpenStreetMap for anywhere in the world in just one line of code. Here are the square-mile diagrams of Portland, San Francisco, Irvine, and Rome created and plotted automatically by OSMnx:
Edward Lorenz, the father of chaos theory, once described chaos as “when the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.”
Lorenz first discovered chaos by accident while developing a simple mathematical model of atmospheric convection, using three ordinary differential equations. He found that nearly indistinguishable initial conditions could produce completely divergent outcomes, rendering weather prediction impossible beyond a time horizon of about a fortnight.
If you use OSMnx in your work, please cite the journal article.
OSMnx is a Python package to retrieve, model, analyze, and visualize street networks from OpenStreetMap. Users can download and model walkable, drivable, or bikeable urban networks with a single line of Python code, and then easily analyze and visualize them. You can just as easily download and work with amenities/points of interest, building footprints, elevation data, street bearings/orientations, and network routing. If you use OSMnx in your work, please download/cite the paper here.
In a single line of code, OSMnx lets you download, model, and visualize the street network for, say, Modena Italy:
import osmnx as ox
ox.plot_graph(ox.graph_from_place('Modena, Italy'))
Check out the journal article about OSMnx, which implements this technique.
A spatial index such as R-tree can drastically speed up GIS operations like intersections and joins. Spatial indices are key features of spatial databases like PostGIS, but they’re also available for DIY coding in Python. I’ll introduce how R-trees work and how to use them in Python and its geopandas library. All of my code is in this notebook in this urban data science GitHub repo.
A few months ago, I wrote about the large investments that U.S. universities are making in their football stadiums. This also included a visual analysis of stadium capacity around the country. Outside of North Korea, the 8 largest stadiums in the world are college football stadiums, and the 15 largest college football stadiums are larger than any NFL stadium.
I received a few comments interested in further analysis of the actual attendance of games held in these stadiums. While capacity is interesting because it represents an expectation and sustained investment by the school, attendance represents the utilization of that investment. My stadium capacity data covered every NCAA division I football stadium in the U.S. as of the 2015 college football season. So, I downloaded the NCAA’s 2015 home game attendance data to compare. My data, code, and analysis are in this GitHub repo. First, I visualized the FBS attendance figures themselves:
This is a summary of our JPER journal article (available here) about Craigslist rental listings’ insights into U.S. housing markets.
Rentals make up a significant portion of the U.S. housing market, but much of this market activity is poorly understood due to its informal characteristics and historically minimal data trail. The UC Berkeley Urban Analytics Lab collected, validated, and analyzed 11 million Craigslist rental listings to discover fine-grained patterns across metropolitan housing markets in the United States. I’ll summarize our findings below and explain the methodology at the bottom.
But first, 4 key takeaways: