The Cycling Hill Misery Index

This is the code used to generate the map on my Cycling Hill Misery Index post.

Dependencies

You need Python 3.x (probably something reasonably recent), and these packages:

• matplotlib (not strictly needed to generate things, but nice for debugging)
• geopandas and its dependencies
• rasterio
• scipy

On Windows follow the instructions from Geoff Boeing to install geopandas.

Additionally GNU Make is nice to have, and QGIS was used to create the final map.

Input data

You definitely need this data (the linked data is for Auckland, New Zealand):

• A digital elevation model: I used the Auckland 1m DEM.

• A roads data set, and some way to read it. I got a data set published by Auckland Council for the HackAKL hackaton in 2014. This was very detailed but it is no longer available. Maybe I’ll use openStreetMap data in the future. make-elevation.py will have to be updated to read this data.

  For the time being the roads-elevation.geojson is included in the repository. The geometry data in this file originally came from Auckland Transport and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 New Zealand. The elevation comes from the 1m DEM.

To make a nice map you’ll probably want some topographic data. LINZ publishes topographic maps, and all the underlying data to generate these maps. You’d probably get:

• Coast lines: this is Auckland.
• Lakes: you’ll definitely be able to tell there’s something off about your map if Lake Pupuke isn’t there.
• Rivers: nice to have

To the best of my knowledge all this data is available under a Creative Commons license. This map, and the underlying raster data is thus also available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.

Making the map

Ideally you could edit the variables in the makefile and run make all. If you have QGIS you can open misery-index.qgz and open the Map layout.

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This page is dedicated to my parents, who had to tolerate me as a child on bicycle rides.