Straight Line

You may have seen Tom Davies aka Geowizard on YouTube, and his straight line adventures across Wales, Norway and Scotland, or perhaps Alastair Stanley's YouTube videos of him straight lining London and Cardiff.

This repository aims to give you a starting point when picking routes similar to Alastair's city straightlines. It keeps to public byways (the exact set it adheres to depends on the activity you pick, walking or biking for instance.) It won't really help with straight line planning across countryside like Geowizard does.

Dependencies

• brew install miniconda

• conda config --prepend channels conda-forge

• conda create -n ox --strict-channel-priority osmnx

• conda init zsh

• Open new terminal, conda activate ox

• Get the world's coastline water polygons from https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/water-polygons.html

  • Download the most recent shapefile, the split version, in WGS84 format. It's about 762MB zipped.
  • Unzip the file, the directory should be called water-polygons-split-4326.

Running

• Edit the relation, filename and activity variables to suit.
  • The activity is placed before filename when writing the image.
  • You get the relation number by searching on https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and searching for towns, cities, countries etc. There are some examples.
• python run.py

Current issues

• Only tested on macOS. It should work elsewhere, you'll need to change/remove the call to os.system at the end of draw_paths on other OSs.
• Hardcoded to use 16 processes to route find.
• It assumes directions betweeen two nodes are bi-directional (which is probably fine for walking) and uses that to do half the number of path finds.
• It's pretty slow when doing country or large-county/state sized regions.
  • And with 16 processes, there isn't enough RAM in the world.
• Doesn't output a .gpx of the final route.
• The code is messy due to the high level of experimenting going on.

Missing

• Doesn't try and calculate how far from straight the line is (ie, how far off a perfect straightline you'd go by travering the route.)

Example

There are several .pngs in the repository, but here is one showing the straightest route when walking across Liverpool.

License, copyright, citations

• Citation info: Boeing, G. 2017. "OSMnx: New Methods for Acquiring, Constructing, Analyzing, and Visualizing Complex Street Networks." Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 65, 126-139. doi:10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2017.05.004

• OpenStreetMap data is copyright OpenStreetMap contributors. OpenStreetMap® is open data, licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF).