robinduckett 3 minutes ago

It seems to render each lane of the roads in my city seperately. It looks good at maximal zoom but worse if you zoom in.

Liftyee 14 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.

  • mrbluecoat 9 minutes ago

    I agree. The pinch zoom was also buttery smooth. Nice job!

pmg101 4 hours ago

If you choose Brighton and zoom in on Hove Park you see the fingerprint maze there very beautifully rendered as a vector, amazing OSM has this detail!

stevage 2 hours ago

So, it's a filter on OpenStreetMap to retrieve all ways with a highway=* tag, and draw them identically?

I think a much faster and easier way to implement this would be using existing sources of vector tiles, but scaled down. You could probably even just use Mapbox GL JS, and scale the whole canvas down by a factor of 4 or something, to avoid the issue of small roads not being present at city-scale zoom levels.

larodi 6 hours ago

This is the level of projects that our GIS students deliver at the end of 60 hours of non-mandatory class. Perhaps 70%+ of visitors of HN can do it if they decide to, it is just an interdisciplinary area that not many explore. A project of similar complexity in the WEB or ML are would never get upvoted so much.

  • aembleton 4 hours ago

    Are there are any tools that your GIS students use to create this? Or is it all code? Any libraries that you can recommend?

    I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines between them.

    How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use for that?

    • cpa 4 hours ago

      A combination of overpass turbo and a LLM would get you started pretty quick. Regarding GIS tools, download QGis (it sucks on mac but is okay on linux or windows)

  • Capricorn2481 6 hours ago

    Is this not a project in the web? Or what would be a web project of similar complexity?

  • matsemann 5 hours ago

    What is your point? That it's "undeserved" and that's bad somehow?

    I think it was a cool visualization and fun to see. And still, 60 hours of research is more than I would put into it, so even if I technically was able to I would've never gotten around to actually do it. So nice to see something else than what I normally work with, even if it might be trivial in that domain.

thih9 4 hours ago

OSM content attribution is missing (either not added or getting clipped) when the data is exported for printing on a mug.

  • matsemann 2 hours ago

    Do you need the attribution when you print it on a mug for personal use?

    • maxerickson 2 hours ago

      That's the terms of the ODBL (produced work in section 4).

      Pedantically, in this case, it isn't personal use either (the site is using the produced image to offer a mug for sale).

      Note that this isn't necessarily an endorsement of those terms.

JSR_FDED 9 hours 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 8 hours ago

    There are many quizzes like that on Sporcle.

rl_for_energy 10 hours ago

One of those simple charming tech experiences. Thanks for sharing!

crabmusket 17 hours ago

I have a map of Brugge (Bruges) from this tool printed off on my wall. It's a great concept!

  • anvaka 14 hours ago

    oh wow. Glad you liked it!

latkin 13 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.

  • remram 12 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 12 hours ago

      I would expect the opposite with a basic LRU cache before the fetch to OSM

      • remram 10 hours ago

        That's fair unfortunately it's not what happened :-(

    • dotancohen 5 hours ago

      I'm in a city well under 50,000 people not in the Americas nor Europe. The site gave a message that it was retrieving the data from OSM, then rendered the map faster than the browser would render a png. Very impressive.

  • NavinF 10 hours ago

    That's surprising. It only took me a couple of seconds to load NYC on my iPhone over 5G

    • zipping1549 6 hours ago

      Some cities are cached and NYC is going to be in it for sure.

  • sandworm101 12 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 11 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 11 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

      • Capricorn2481 6 hours ago

        Because they cache the biggest cities in the world.

        > 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. The cities are stored into a cache in this github repositor

Amorymeltzer 17 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 14 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

elbac 12 hours ago

This is wonderful. Great job.

imnotlost 12 hours ago

Love it! I did a few cities where I’ve lived and it brings me back.

kayvulpe 14 hours ago

Incredible! May take a while for a big city, but well worth the wait.

tekno45 18 hours ago

Idk how long itd take normally so just kinda neat.

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

cjs_ac 4 hours ago

* Greater London excludes the City of London

* Footpaths and cycleways and shown as roads but railways are not

mulhoon 17 hours ago

Simple and effective. Beautiful to look at.

dudeinjapan 7 hours ago

Well done! I tried Tokyo, and discovered it looks funny/disjointed because several far away islands like Hachijojima are part of Tokyo municipality.

okasaki 15 hours ago

Great idea. Might print some and hang them.

  • dotancohen 5 hours ago

    I was thinking that this would be a great gift, to print a set of dinner plates with every place that I know the couple lived in. Each plate a different city.

    Though I'm a bit worried about paint near food, especially for custom jobs.