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City roads – This website renders every single road within a city (anvaka.github.io)
173 points by thunderbong on June 6, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 30 comments



I'm impressed that it worked so smoothly after I entered Tokyo. Fully expected my phone's browser to crash at any time as it proceeded to download 34MB of data. Scrolling and zooming didn't even stutter.

I've done a thing with the same base idea in the past, and absolutely love the style of those things, especially if there are enough roads available to get a more dense shape: https://christian.rinjes.me/posts/2020-11-25-tokyo-street-ar...


Discussion from last year, including comments by the author: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22120449


It also appears to render footpaths in parks etc, which makes it look a bit weird in places - the monochrome rendering made it hard for me to find locations and the landmarks I am used to seeing (i.e. major parks and green space) were hard to find as they had "roads" criss-crossing them (when they don't in real life)


It filters to ways with the "highway" attribute, which has possible values including "footway", "bridleway", "steps", and "corridor" in addition to the ones you'd expect with the American definition of the word ("motorway", etc)

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway?uselang=en

https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/blob/08a21bce05ad2b08d4...


It also neglects to filter for areas and renders them as if they were a road loop.


I was surprised to see that it included the structure of a garden maze in my local park that is totally unmaintained and that I’ve never seen anybody enter.


If it’s mapped as `highway`=something in OpenSteetMap it will show up on this site ;)


It rendered my dead-end, private driveway. Does this mean that the data doesn't distinguish "roads" from other paths, that the data has some errors, or that the program is rendering more than just labeled "roads"?


> the program is rendering more than just labeled "roads"


There is another website that renders every railway in a city: https://abaumg.github.io/railways/


https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ is probably more useful, unless you really just want a visualisation.


Thanks; that one doesn’t seem to cope with how big Berlin is… or there’s a tiling bug.


Really nice output, would be nice if you could include rivers, they are core to the identity of a lot of places.


Gorgeous clean renders. Now I want to print and hang these all around my house!


If you like the minimalist rendering style, you can buy prints that are similar from https://routelines.com/


To be pedantic, the map is not the territory. If there are new roads not yet in Open Street Map, this website won't render it.


Not sure what you expected, nor what value your critique offers.


Really beautiful output! I think I saw a similar site that had monetized the idea by selling prints and/or engravings.


I think the monetization should be done by OpenStreetMaps, in all fairness.


The lack of street names, coastlines, line-width cues, etc., can demand close study to find even familiar features. This, and the spareness of the interface, makes for a very captivating website. Streets are a maze well worth exploring.


Looking at this through the lens of TTRPG referee - this thing is gold. I'm always looking for blank basemaps I can easily place a hex layer over or use as hex detail.


Cool project!

Wish I could output this to an svg so I could do a high res print for a wall photo.

Other small detail. Would be cool if the url updated so I could just send a link to the press arched page.


You can output this as an SVG - just click 'Customise' and find the relevant option to do so.

This just takes data from OpenStreetMap, which itself allows for exportation of SVG data - but everythng available, not just roads.


https://woodcutmaps.com/ is pretty nice too


This is really cool. Kudos


3 mugs ordered :)


Very nicely done and beautiful vector output.


Pretty cool!


Not sure why people says this is awesome. This data is publicly available and requires low processing to be displayed.


But it needs to be done. And this site makes it easily available for any city you want.




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