Is Your Home Too Close to a Road?

I live in a Victorian terrace in London where the houses lack front gardens, leaving my sitting room wall less than 10 feet from the road. While my street is quiet, this proximity to the curb makes noise pollution a constant threat in busier areas. To visualize this urban reality, OSM House to Street offers an interactive map that calculates the exact distance between building exteriors and the nearest road.

Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data, the map processes millions of building contours to calculate the distance from every individual wall vertex to the nearest road segment. Technically, it functions as a high-resolution proximity analysis. By filtering for specific road types - from major trunks down to small residential living streets - it shows the relationship between our homes and vehicular traffic. At a glance, you can see which neighborhoods enjoy deep setbacks and which residents are practically living on the asphalt.

The map of Zurich (screenshot above) shows a large cluster of bright yellow buildings in the center of the city, particularly around the Niederdorf (right bank) and the area near the Münsterhof (left bank). In these medieval cores, the distance from a house wall to the nearest drivable road is at its highest. This highlights the pedestrianized nature of Zürich’s historical center. 

OSM House to Street reminds me a little of Hans Hack's Retreats from Streets interactive map. Both projects are examples of distance-field style spatial analysis, using Euclidean geometry to map exactly how far any given point is from the nearest road.. However, while both use similar datasets, they are looking for two very different things. Hack’s "Retreats" map focuses on inaccessibility. It highlights the "voids" - the parks and forests where the distance to the nearest road is at its greatest. It is a map for the hiker or the seeker of silence. OSM House to Street, conversely, is a map of encroachment. It ignores the woods and focuses on the built environment, measuring how road networks impact on our private living spaces.