Growing Urban Bicycle Networks

This is the source code for the scientific paper Growing urban bicycle networks by M. Szell, S. Mimar, T. Perlman, G. Ghoshal, and R. Sinatra. The code downloads and pre-processes data from OpenStreetMap, prepares points of interest, runs simulations, measures and saves the results, creates videos and plots.

Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-10783-y
Data repository: zenodo.5083049
Visualization: GrowBike.Net
Videos & Plots: https://growbike.net/download

Folder structure

The main folder/repo is bikenwgrowth, containing Jupyter notebooks (code/), preprocessed data (data/), parameters (parameters/), result plots (plots/), HPC server scripts and jobs (scripts/).

Other data files (network plots, videos, results, exports, logs) make up many GBs and are stored in the separate external folder bikenwgrowth_external due to Github's space limitations.

Setting up code environment

Conda yml

Download .yml

Manual procedure

conda create --override-channels -c conda-forge -n OSMNX python=3.8.2 osmnx=0.16.2 python-igraph watermark haversine rasterio tqdm geojson
conda activate OSMNX
conda install -c conda-forge ipywidgets
pip install opencv-python
conda install -c anaconda gdal
pip install --user ipykernel
python -m ipykernel install --user --name=OSMNX

Run Jupyter Notebook with kernel OSMNX (Kernel > Change Kernel > OSMNX)

Running the code on an HPC cluster with SLURM

For multiple, esp. large, cities, running the code on a high performance computing cluster is strongly suggested as the tasks are easy to paralellize. The shell scripts are written for SLURM.

1. Populate parameters/cities.csv, see below.
2. Run 01 and 02 once locally to download and prepare all networks and POIs (The alternative is server-side sbatch scripts/download.job, but OSMNX throws too many connection issues, so manual supervision is needed)
3. Upload code/*.py, parameters/*, scripts/*
4. Run: ./mastersbatch_analysis.sh
5. Run, if needed: ./mastersbatch_export.sh
6. After all is finished, run: ./cleanup.sh
7. Recommended, run: ./fixresults.sh (to clean up results in case of amended data from repeated runs)

Running the code locally

Single (or few/small) cities could be run locally but require manual, step-by-step execution of Jupyter notebooks:

1. Populate parameters/cities.csv, see below.
2. Run 01 and 02 once to download and prepare all networks and POIs
3. Run 03,04,05 for each parameter set (see below), set in parameters/parameters.py
4. Run 06 or other steps as needed.

Parameter sets

1. prune_measure = "betweenness", poi_source = "railwaystation"
2. prune_measure = "betweenness", poi_source = "grid"
3. prune_measure = "closeness", poi_source = "railwaystation"
4. prune_measure = "closeness", poi_source = "grid"
5. prune_measure = "random", poi_source = "railwaystation"
6. prune_measure = "random", poi_source = "grid"

Populating cities.csv

Checking nominatimstring

• Go to e.g. https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search.php?q=paris%2C+france&polygon_geojson=1&viewbox= and enter the search string. If a correct polygon (or multipolygon) pops up it should be fine. If not leave the field empty and acquire a shape file, see below.

Acquiring shape file

• Go to Overpass, to the city, and run: relation["boundary"="administrative"]["name:en"="Copenhagen Municipality"]({{bbox}});(._;>;);out skel;
• Export: Download as GPX
• Use QGIS to create a polygon, with Vector > Join Multiple Lines, and Processing Toolbox > Polygonize (see Stackexchange answer 1 and Stackexchange answer 2)