
Rückzugsorte – Map of areas in Berlin which are the furthest away from a street - epaga
http://hanshack.com/rueckzugsorte/
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jacek
Related: map of noise pollution in Berlin
[https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/laermkarte-
berlin/](https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/laermkarte-berlin/)

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mewwts
This is so cool! Would love to have this kind of information before I rent or
buy an apartment.

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JorgeGT
If you live in the EU, there's an European directive making noise maps
mandatory: _Member States shall adopt the measures necessary to ensure that no
later than 30 June 2012, and thereafter every five years, strategic noise maps
showing the situation in the preceding calendar year have been made and, where
relevant, approved by the competent authorities for all agglomerations and for
all major roads and major railways within their territories. END Directive
(2002 /49/EC)_

There's a basic online viewer here:
[http://noise.eea.europa.eu/](http://noise.eea.europa.eu/) but the GIS data is
available here: [http://cdr.eionet.europa.eu/](http://cdr.eionet.europa.eu/)

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lazyjones
Unfortunately, legislation in some countries (at least 1, Austria) prohibits
use of this data for commercial projects.

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ChuckNorris89
Is it me or is Austria most paranoid country in Europe in regards to privacy?

IIRC, dash/helmet cams are also not allowed here due to privacy, which is
crazy. A friend of mine was hit by a car while riding his bike and now has to
fight the driver in court to get justice since there were no witnesses. A cam
would have made a night/day difference.

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fit2rule
Its a really weird rule, but Austria is full of weird rules.

First - its not true that you cannot use a dash cam. You just can't ever
publish any media from that camera that might be used to identify a person -
even in a court of law, when attempting to prove your own innocence.

You can use a dash cam to record your journey - but if you ever show the video
to anyone, you must render anyone in that video un-identifiable, and that goes
for license plates as well.

Also, a common misconception among Austrians is that you need permission to
film someone in public. This is not true - no such permission is required, and
you can record anyone in any public space, any time you want.

You're just not allowed to use that recording to identify someone, nor for
commercial purposes - without express permission.

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oh_sigh
Wait - so if a person runs a red light and crashes into my car, I can't use
dashcam footage from my car showing that I had a green light and the other
drive ran the red light?

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fit2rule
You can, as long as you don't identify the driver and use the evidence only to
illustrate your own action.

Crazy, isn't it? But nobody said Austrian law is sane.

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ChuckNorris89
If you can't identify the guilty driver how does the video footage help your
case then?

No offense to anyone, I like privacy focused societies but taking it to such
an extent that it ends up protecting the wrong doers is the society equivalent
of selling your liver to buy a kidney.

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fit2rule
>If you can't identify the guilty driver how does the video footage help your
case then?

You can use it to prove your own actions - i.e. was safely stopped at the
green light when you were smashed into by another car.

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odiroot
Hah! I live inside one of these bubbles in Mitte.

The truth is the grid of Altbau (pre-war) buildings is great to live in,
especially if you don't share the flat and can utilise the "back" room as a
bedroom. But pretty much most side streets (at least in the West) are super
quiet -- thanks to speed bumps, narrow lanes, treeline and wide sidewalks.

EDIT: Also many points are in heavy-industry areas (like Westhafen) so being
far away from the street doesn't change much.

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eru
Central London (of all places!) also has really quiet and walkable side
streets.

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odiroot
What neighbourhoods do you have in mind?

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eru
I used to live in Clerkenwell and usually walked a bit north and East. Eg
towards the Earl of Essex, or even just the side streets in the City itself.

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cnj
Nice!

If I re-engineered your algorithm correctly, it tries to find the single
largest circle within a grid of streets.

This, unfortunately doesn't work well for a river that isn't frequently broken
up by bridges.

E.g. the whole area of Treptower Park, Insel der Jugend, Stralau and
Rummelsburger Bucht doesn't have a Rueckzugsort next to the water (there is
only a big one in Plaenterwald for that whole part of the Spree).

Nice work, though. I'd be interested in a version of this that maximizes
walking or biking time without crossing streets!

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terminalhealth
Working with circles seems weird. I would have computed a Voronoi tessellation
with Fortune's algorithm (also n log n) and colored the result with OpenGL
triangles. Even better would be to estimate traffic density of the roads based
on road type and some measure of centricity/connectedness and also weight the
resulting values with that. A small central spot sourrounded by small streets
may be calmer than a large peripheral one right next to a high way.

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mkl
I can think of computationally intensive probabilistic algorithms to find
these circles (e.g. hill-climbing by randomly mutating circles), but is there
a way to guarantee optimality? I.e. find the absolute largest circle inside a
given polygon.

Is there any information about how these particular circles were generated?

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yorwba
There appears to be an O(n log n) algorithm:
[https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4279478/largest-
circle-i...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4279478/largest-circle-
inside-a-non-convex-polygon/46867645#46867645)

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gillesjacobs
Nice work! Would be nice if the tooling could be open sourced so it can be
applied to any area of interest.

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lazyjones
Anyone interested in building a "livability" map with noise, air pollution,
traffic, demographic indicators, proximity to nuclear reactors, flood and
other natural hazards risk etc. or anyone doing this already?

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ovi256
>proximity to nuclear reactors

Don't forget proximity to vaccines!

On a more serious note, a coal plant (like there are plenty in Germany) will
spew 10x more radionuclides in the air than a nuclear plant for the same
amount of produced electricity.

So why aren't you avoiding coal plants rather than nuclear power plants again
?

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yorwba
Coal plants are already covered by air pollution measurements.

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coddingtonbear
The point being made is that a properly funtioning nuclear power plant emits
very little radiation when compared to a coal-powered plant.

Coal power plants, even with emission regulations, are very dirty as far as
radioactive emissions are concerned.

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Tepix
The risk of cancer for small children is doubled near a nuclear plant, see
[https://www.bfs.de/DE/bfs/wissenschaft-
forschung/ergebnisse/...](https://www.bfs.de/DE/bfs/wissenschaft-
forschung/ergebnisse/kikk/kikk-studie.html)

~~~
coddingtonbear
There could be, of course, confounding factors; I can't read German, but I can
say that in the US at least, cancer rates are elevated in industrial zones in
general -- exactly the places that nuclear reactors are constructed.

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dima55
It's pretty simple and fun to compute these for your own use cases.
Openstreetmap data is really useful here. One implementation:

[http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-
inacc...](http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-
inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mountains.html)

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hannob
Nice idea.

Though looking at my area a few of the larger dots are inaccessible industrial
areas. Not exactly what you're looking for. Wonder if that could be made more
intelligent.

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jglauche
Nice idea. I'd like to see something applicable for other cities (via
openstreetmap?) to explore possible partially remote areas where I could be
living; along with the possibility to hook it up with more data.

Background: pretty bad case of asthma, car exhausts being one thing that makes
things worse.

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tempodox
Very nice how the resolution increases when zooming in. This should exist for
every city.

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viach
Would me interesting to compare this with a map of criminal activities
statistics.

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amelius
Can someone mathematically formulate the exact problem that is solved here?

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dima55
[http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-
inacc...](http://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-
inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mountains.html)

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gerogerke
There's a big bubble right over the airport Tegel (TXL) hwich I would consider
no place of silence ;)

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whoopdedo
Probably should have included railroads as well.

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bkfh
Nice! Berliner here, living very closely to a large green bubble in Neukölln
(Tempelhofer Feld)

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looperhacks
Nice idea! This seems to ignore smaller streets though, why?

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Freak_NL
Probably because those are mapped in OpenStreetMap as _service_ roads (which
includes alleys, driveways, parking lanes, etc.). The author of this map seems
to have queried all roads in Berlin from Autobahn down to residential streets,
and left out service roads, and bicycle and foot paths.

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NapoleonIT
Great work!

