[Talk-us] Safe Routes to School Mapping Toolkit concept

[Josh Doe]

Hello all,
I've mentioned Safe Routes to School (SRTS) before, but I've now got
an idea for a mapping toolkit. I'll just paste what I wrote on the
wiki below.

"Safe Routes to School Mapping Toolkit is the concept for a tool to be
used by schools or communities to generate maps for applications to
the United States federal program Safe Routes to School (SRTS),
however many of the potential tools could be used by any community to
analyze how accessible a given location is to pedestrians or cyclists.
The main products will be a set of maps showing existing walking and
biking infrastructure, proposed improvements, and walking/biking
distance maps (isochrones) for before and after the improvements.

This toolkit could be a great benefit to SRTS participants, as well as
benefit OSM by exposing it to a broader audience, and getting more
communities (especially in the US) involved in contributing to OSM.

The overall goal of this project is to lower the barriers to analyzing
the current walking/biking infrastructure of a school or other
location, as well as the impact of infrastructure improvements.
Instead of requiring the use of GIS professionals to create such an
analysis, this toolkit will allow anyone with basic web skills to
create advanced geographic reports.

Initial goals are to create walking distance maps manually via
PostGIS, pgRouting, and QGIS. Longer term goals include automatic
creation of said maps via a web interface, and even longer term is a
web interface whereby proposed infrastructure (sidewalks, crossings,
etc) can be drawn in and the improvements quantified (e.g. 20% more
students will be within walking distance if this sidewalk is added)."

For more info visit the wiki:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Safe_Routes_to_School_Mapping_Toolkit

If you have any comments, please let me know! Also, if you're
interested in helping at all, I'd appreciate it very much. I'm
especially in need of help with PostGIS/pgRouting. I'm presenting this
concept (as well as OSM in general) to a bicycling advocacy group on
Wednesday, and I hope to have something rudimentary to show them (I
have been able to make a basic walking distance map, though without
accounting for unsafe crossings).

Thanks,
-Josh