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

[semi-extrinsic]

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

[noiv]

It's JavaScript and exposes an extensive API via console: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads/blob/main/API.md#loadin...

[Liftyee]

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]

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

[Defenestresque]

The hobby-sized projects/videos on your Twitter are mesmerizing: https://x.com/anvaka

Talk about a true hacker mindset. Great bloody job!

[hiatus]

Link to the github project: https://github.com/anvaka/city-roads

[stevage]

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.

[thih9]

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

[matsemann]

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

[walski]

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]

Oh damn, I thought this is a Show HN :D

[pmg101]

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!

[JSR_FDED]

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]

There are many quizzes like that on Sporcle.

[crabmusket]

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

[lippihom]

Was hoping to do something like this but have had the formatting always come out wonky. Any tips?

[anvaka]

oh wow. Glad you liked it!

[rl_for_energy]

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

[latkin]

In case others gave up, it took about 2.5 minutes to load my (midsize city) hometown from OpenStreetMap. So hang in there.

[remram]

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.

[sandworm101]

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.

[NavinF]

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

[peppertree]

There's also a Figma plugin that can import OSM as vector. https://www.figma.com/community/plugin/1251030017228239072/v...

[dudeinjapan]

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

[Amorymeltzer]

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]

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

[robinduckett]

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.

[okasaki]

Great idea. Might print some and hang them.

[dotancohen]

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.

[tekno45]

Idk how long itd take normally so just kinda neat.

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

[elbac]

This is wonderful. Great job.

[kayvulpe]

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