AccessMap Incremental

Please note that this project is a tech demo and reproducing its functionality is difficult at this time.

AccessMap Incremental is an experimental project to provide useful pedestrian trip planning in situations where pedestrian network data is missing for one of two (common) reasons:

Nobody has audited an area for whether dedicated pedestrian network elements exist. For example, a city that has a lot of sidewalks but they have not yet been added to any map.
Certain dedicated pedestrian network elements do not exist and pedestrians need "backup" options. For example, a suburban area may have been constructed on the premise that the primary mode of transportation will be single occupancy vehicles starting and ending at detached housing.

There are also scenarios in which the primary pedestrian network includes the street network and is shared with vehicles. The current version of AccessMap does not model this situation well, but this project will attempt to so that AccessMap can be deployed for a wider cultural and policy context.

Creating Audit-Annotated OpenSidewalks Data

This repo is derived from the AccessMap deployment workflow, with three big differences:

It includes a full bottom-up data pipeline using OpenStreetMap and public DEM datasets. The main accessmap deployment workflow assumes you can bring your own OpenSidewalks-format transportation.geojson file, whereas this repo does not.
You must define a config.geojson file to configure the data process. This file is identical to the regions.geojson file expected by AccessMap, except now each region include information on where to retrieve its OpenStreetMap data. This repo hardcodes the current, live config file at input/config.geojson and you can use it as an example.
This repo also supports an "audit" annotation pipeline based on OpenStreetMap Tasking Manager task exports (on a tasking manager, enable expert mode for your account, go to a project page, scroll to the bottom and export the ask grid). Namely, it expects you to populate a sidewalks tasks and a crossings tasks input folders with such exports. Any OpenSidewalks data that intersects completed tasks will be marked as audited. The output of this step is used as the transportation.geojson used to drive the AccessMap web application.

Before doing anything else

Clone this repo! Run:

git clone https://github.com/accessmap/accessmap-incremental

Then cd accessmap-incremental

All of the instructions below assume you're running commands in the accessmap-incremental directory.

Creating OpenSidewalks data from OpenStreetMap

This is a simple, three-step process: (1) create accessmap-incremental.env, (2) edit input/config.geojson to your preferences (3) run docker-compose up data_fetch to fetch the source data and (4) docker-compose up data_osm_osw to build the data. This process uses the osm_osw package defined in this repo.

`accessmap-incremental.env`

docker-compose needs to find settings in a file named accessmap-incremental.env in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file. This repository provides a sample file to get you started quickly, and only one change to it is required in order to run the data process. To use this sample file, run:

cp accessmap-incremental.env.sample accessmap-incremental.env

(Or just create a copy with your file manager and rename it)

The one change required is to set the MAPBOX_TOKEN environment variable to a valid Mapbox token id.

`config.geojson`

This configuration file is a GeoJSON FeatureCollection, which is essentially just an annotated list of (Multi)Polygon shapes representing an area intended to be extracted from OpenStreetMap and turned into routable OpenSidewalks data. An example is already present in input/config.geojson. Each "Feature" will have a polygon describing the area covered and a set of properties, all of which must be defined:

id: A unique identifier string for this region. It can be anything so long as it is unique, it is only used internally. We typically use country.city or something along those lines.
name: The human-readable name for this region, it will appear in the AccessMap web application.
lon, lat, and zoom: The coordinates and map zoom level for a canonical "view" of the city. This will determine the initial view of this region within AccessMap when someone selects this region.
extract_url: A URL to a .osm.pbf file that includes this region. It will be fetched automatically and used to extract path information.

Running the data process

Fetching and extracting data into an OpenSidewalks Schema-compatible

GeoJSON

To fetch the source data, run this in the main directory of this repo:

docker-compose up data_fetch

To build/process the data into an OpenSidewalks-compatible format, run this in the main directory of this repo:

docker-compose up data_osm_osw

Annotating with audit information

AccessMap incremental's primary value-add is the ability to distinguish between areas that have been audited for pedestrian network data and those that have not, then allowing website visitors to set parameters based on these data (uncertainty, safety, confidence, etc). Whether a network element has been audited falls under the data process included in this repo, but it is a separate one from the initial OpenSidewalks data process and uses a package called incremental defined in this repo.

The incremental process is similarly two-step: (1) Put tasking manager task grid exports into input/tasks/crossings_tasks and input/tasks/sidewalks_tasks and (2) run docker-compose up data_incremental.

This will create output/transportation-tasks.geojson, which is a version of the transportation.geojson file created in the OpenSidewalks data process that has been enriched with two new properties: crossings_mapped and sidewalks_mapped. All network elements will have this property, set to either 0 (not audited) or 1 (audited). This file is expected by the next steps of building assets and running the application.

Architecture and Running the Application

This project has been cobbled together from a few codebases in order to rapidly produce a tech demo. This should not be considered a particularly maintainable strategy. This section described how it is built in case an unlucky someone does need to work off of this codebase.

AccessMap incremental is a web application that functions essentially identically to AccessMap: a series of microservices serving up web APIS and a single page React application. In addition, the data process has been embedded into this repository, as special elements need to be tied together in order for AccessMap Incremental to function - namely, the pedestrian network needs to be spatially joined with a set of "audit" polygons that indicate whether an area has been audited for pedestrian network elements.

Deploying the Web Application

Deployment of the web application is nearly identical to a standard deployment of AccessMap: it is managed by a two-step docker-compose workflow that first builds data assets (network elements into a database, vector tiles, web front end) and then runs the microservices and a reverse proxy that ties everything together.

1. Configuring the system

This project is configured through the accessmap-incremental.env file. Modify the settings there to the current deployment. Use HOST=localhost and TLS=tls off for a local deployment.

2. Building the assets

After creating the transportation-tasks.geojson file produced in the data process, run:

docker-compose --profile build up

This will prepare all the assets for the next stages.

3. Running the web application

After building the assets, simply run:

docker-compose up

Maintaining / updating a deployment

`rebuild.sh`

This repository includes a simple bash script that, when run, will automatically:

Fetch fresh OpenStreetMap and tasking manager data
Rebuild all data via existing pipelines
Rebuild all relevant docker-compose services (the router, the React front end, etc).
Re-deploy all relevant docker-compose services (the router, the React front end, and the Caddy reverse proxy).

The current main deployment of accessmap-incremental runs this script at 2 AM every day via a cron job.

Updating

accessmap-incremental is developed from an open source, public git repository and will be updated from time to time. If you want to pull the latest changes, you can use git directly via git pull origin main.

If you know what services do and don't need to be updated, you can of course run your own docker-compose commands to rebuild and redeploy them. But in general, after pulling a new version of accessmap-incremental you may run these commands to ensure a complete update:

docker-compose build --profile data --no-cache
docker-compose build --profile build --no-cache
docker-compose build --no-cache
docker-compose down --profile data && docker-compose up -d --profile data
docker-compose down --profile build && docker-compose up -d --profile build
docker-compose down && docker-compose up -d

Rebuilding the router

There are circumstances in which you want to redeploy the router. To be sure that it's fully redeployed, run:

docker-compose up build_router

And then

docker-compose up -d router

Editing the cost function

There are two contexts in which you might want to edit the cost function:

When developing a new one and you need rapid feedback.
When you have a clear cost function developed and want it to be used in future deployments.

For the rapid feedback mode, edit build/router/cost-*.py, where the .py file is a given cost function. Restarting the router container (docker-compose stop router && docker-compose rm -f router && docker-compose up -d router) will load the changes. However, the build directory is overwritten on future deployments, so once you like how the cost function looks, copy it to the config/unweaver directory. Keep a close look at permissions - the build directory might be owned by a root user and you'll need to change permissions, e.g. chown youruser:youruser config/router/cost-*.py.

paulterinho/accessmap-incremental