Monday, March 02, 2020

Sub Francisco



Today I've been creating a number of visualizations which show how U.S. cities might look after 20 meters of sea level rise. All of my maps were created with the impressive City Roads map.

City Roads is an online tool which can be used to create a road map for any city in the world. Enter a city name into City Roads and it will generate a map of the city using only the city's road network using data from OpenStreetMap.



City Roads generates very simple maps which shows roads drawn in black on top of a grey background. However you can enhance the capabilities of City Roads using city-script, a new collection of scripts which can be added to City Roads to give it more functions. At the moment there are two scripts available Color by Elevation (which I used to create the Sub Francisco & Seattle maps above) and Find Paths.



Instructions for using the scripts are provided on each script's GitHub page. In essence it just involves typing the scripts into your developer console with City Roads open in your browser. The Color by Elevation script is fairly easy to understand as it simply colors the city's roads based on their elevation. The Find Paths script is a little harder to explain. This draws the shortest paths in any city between two random points, or between one fixed point and thousands of random points. Using the script it is possible to create similar maps to the very popular All Roads Lead to Rome visualization (shown above) - but at a city scale.

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