Street steepness in Santa Cruz

Project description

I aim to make a map of Santa Cruz showing the steepness of major streets, inspired by Toby Eglesfield’s map for the disAbilities Resource Centre in Queenstown, NZ:

Toby wrote a lot about his design process. The map combines:

• a regular street map
• locations of bathrooms, parking lots, picnic areas, and other POIs
• an approximation of the steepness of streets, shown with colored wedges

Goals list

• Map shows streets and is usable for navigation.
• Map shows elevation and makes it easy to see where steep routes are.
• Interactivity: user can select streets, create simple routes using the mouse, and view elevation profiles.
• Pretty graphics, like Toby’s trees.

Timeline

1. Week 4 (done!): render road paths from OpenStreetMap to SVG using D3.js. Check out map.html.
2. By week 7: Design and implement generic graphics for ramps showing elevation. This will probably be the hardest part. I'll need to apply perspective to the map for anything pseudo-3D to make sense, and determine how to draw ramps.
3. Week 7: Gather elevation data and attach to map. In theorey, this step will be replacing dummy data with real elevation data.
• The Elevation Point Query Service API makes getting data easy. (example request)
• There's also the Bulk Point Query Service, where you upload up to 500 request in a CSV file.
• And The National Map Elevation viewer, where you can draw a path and get an elevation profile.
4. Week 8-9: Add interactivity. The user should be able to click on road segments and view elevation profiles. I beleive 3D has some built-in tools for this.
5. Polish UI, if time permits. Adding trees, bodies of water, whatever.

Prior art

Topographic maps display elevation using lines of constant elevation. The topo map from the USGS, avaliable at viewer.nationalmap.gov, is extremly dense. A single-page map, which is more than half water, is more than 20 MB. Screenshot of detail below.

Terrain maps use shading to make the ground appear 3D. Terrain maps are easier to visually interpret than topographic maps, but can still be overwhelming. In the screenshot below from Google Maps, consider the density of slopes on UCSC campus.

In constrast to a terrain and topo maps, I would like my map to be visually simple. Several others have made maps specifically concerning road steepness.

Hill Mapper San Francisco by Sam Maurer shows whether streets go up or down and their steepness depending on where you're starting from:

In The Steeps of San Fransisco, Stephen Von Worley set out to find San Fransisco's steepest street and made a color-graded map:

A post on the Atlas Lens blog shows whether roads are steep or not in Hermann, Missouri: