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 ...
