City Roads: A tool to draw all roads in a city at once

(anvaka.github.io)

187 points | by gaws 13 hours ago

16 comments

  • semi-extrinsic 9 hours ago
    Would be nicer if it would distinguish (just varying line thickness) between footpaths, roads, highways etc. Many European cities look messy in this view.

    IMO, prettymaps is quite a bit better: https://github.com/marceloprates/prettymaps

  • Liftyee 6 hours ago
    In the age of bloated resource hogs, I was pleasantly surprised that this rendered with no perceptible lag or stuttering, even on my phone. Impressive how everything is drawn so efficiently.
  • JSR_FDED 1 hour ago
    I was intrigued by how many of the 3000 cities you’ve cached I had heard of. You used population size >100k as cutoff, it would be interesting to compare how many cities someone has heard of with their population size.

    This would be a fun metric to rate someone’s “global orientation”.

    Only recognize the cities with >1M people? Low GO score (or more charitably, high Local Focus score :-)

    • rplnt 47 minutes ago
      There are many quizzes like that on Sporcle.
  • hiatus 6 hours ago
    Link to the github project: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads
  • walski 9 hours ago
    I get a 403 for some cities. E.g. Wyk (auf Föhr) returns 403 on this .pbf resource: https://city-roads.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/nov-02-2020/36...
    • walski 9 hours ago
      Oh damn, I thought this is a Show HN :D
      • anvaka 6 hours ago
        appreciate the feedback - I'll take a look
  • latkin 5 hours ago
    In case others gave up, it took about 2.5 minutes to load my (midsize city) hometown from OpenStreetMap. So hang in there.
    • NavinF 2 hours ago
      That's surprising. It only took me a couple of seconds to load NYC on my iPhone over 5G
    • remram 4 hours ago
      Probably going to hit the paradox here, where most people are going to request a place where many people live, even though most places are small.

      I probably have no chance, living in NYC.

      • zactato 4 hours ago
        I would expect the opposite with a basic LRU cache before the fetch to OSM
        • remram 2 hours ago
          That's fair unfortunately it's not what happened :-(
    • sandworm101 4 hours ago
      I'm at 10 minutes now, for a town of <15k. Render time might depend more on total area than number of lines to draw. Update: gave up after 20min. Something might be wrong with the particular city.
      • fnordpiglet 3 hours ago
        Render time for Seattle is a blink of the eye which has both area and density. I think the time people is observing is loading the raw data from open street map itself.
        • flufluflufluffy 3 hours ago
          About 2 seconds for me to load and draw Los Angeles. It’s definitely the load time/network latency, depending on where it’s loading from. This is amazing! I might use it for a custom map or something
  • rl_for_energy 2 hours ago
    One of those simple charming tech experiences. Thanks for sharing!
  • peppertree 8 hours ago
    There's also a Figma plugin that can import OSM as vector. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1251030017228239072/v...
  • elbac 4 hours ago
    This is wonderful. Great job.
  • crabmusket 9 hours ago
    I have a map of Brugge (Bruges) from this tool printed off on my wall. It's a great concept!
    • anvaka 6 hours ago
      oh wow. Glad you liked it!
  • imnotlost 4 hours ago
    Love it! I did a few cities where I’ve lived and it brings me back.
  • Amorymeltzer 9 hours ago
    Neat! Lovely to look at. Is it caching just the most popular or previous searches?

    The option to print on a mug with one link is pretty neat! Might actually do that...

    • HellsMaddy 6 hours ago
      From the README[0]:

      > To improve the performance of download, I indexed ~3,000 cities with population larger than 100,000 people and stored into a very simple protobuf format.

      [0] https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads

  • kayvulpe 6 hours ago
    Incredible! May take a while for a big city, but well worth the wait.
  • tekno45 9 hours ago
    Idk how long itd take normally so just kinda neat.

    But i love the slack in the dragging around the map.

  • mulhoon 9 hours ago
    Simple and effective. Beautiful to look at.
  • okasaki 7 hours ago
    Great idea. Might print some and hang them.