CycleMon: automated generation of basic walking and cycling analysis from open data

Academic paper: see the paper/ subdirectory here.

Usage

Prerequisites

• Currently, Windows (7 or higher). This is due to the requirements of sDNA, though we hope to change that soon.
• QGIS+GRASS. We used QGIS version 3.14 with GRASS 7.8.3.
  • To fix a bug in scripting QGIS, we needed to add the following line to OSGeo4W.bat in the QGIS install directory: call "C:\Program Files\QGIS 3.14\apps\grass\grass78\etc\env.bat"
• sDNA Open, version 4.2 or later https://github.com/fiftysevendegreesofrad/sdna_open/releases/tag/v4.2.0
• R
• Python 3, including pyrosm. https://pypi.org/project/pyrosm/
  • We managed dependencies with Anaconda, as such you could install our python environment with conda env create -f code/conda_env.yml then activate with conda activate cyclemon
• GNU Make or (for better debugging) remake http://bashdb.sourceforge.net/remake/; which therefore (in Windows) require MSYS

Input data

The directory input-data/ should contain the following

• input-data
  • towns
    • (directory for each town, with name chosen by you e.g. monmouth)
      • cycle-buffer.shp containing a single polygon with the area of interest
      • destinations.shp containing a single point with destination of interest
      • destination-zones.csv containing trip counts from each origin zone to the destination of interest
  • zone-polygons.shp containing named polygons for all the origin zones
  • terrain.tif containing height data

Configuring the model

• Open code/Makefile and check the paths at the top match your install locations of QGIS and sDNA_Open.

• Open code/osm_download.py and edit the following line, changing wales to the appropriate region supported by pyrosm (see https://pyrosm.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basics.html#available-datasets), such as great_britain ... unless of course, your model falls entirely in Wales):

    data = pyrosm.get_data("wales",directory="../intermediate-data-scratch") 
  

• Open QGIS, navigate to Settings -> Options -> Processing -> Scripts -> Scripts folder(s): add the full path to cyclemon\code\qgis_scripts to the list of folders. Close and re-open QGIS to make sure your change persisted.

Running the model

e.g. To generate all models from input-data/towns/monmouth:

cd code

make monmouth-town-all

Check intermediate-data-scratch/towns/(your town)/tag-decode-errors.gpkg (if it exists) to check for any OSM tags we thought might need manual interpretation.

Check output-data/towns/(your town) for the results. As a starting point have a look at

• summary_walk_qgis.qgs
• summary_cycle_qgis.qgs
• all_outputs_qgis.qgs

and see metadata.html for a description of each layer within these.

For more detail on how each output was computed, check the academic paper and/or comments in Makefile.