How many kilometers of cycle paths in some European cities? Note that the code lives here.

Introduction

We want to find the total distance of cycle paths in these 6 cities:

Geographical information about each city

First step, let’s create a spatial data frame for each city containing its boundaries (or in the case of London, the boundaries of all its boroughs). It will also be the occasion to get the coordinates for a bounding box containing the whole city.

The country code are 3-letter ISO country codes, that one can get in the countrycode R package for instance.

Since the cities are at different level of administrative divisions depending on the country, we’ll find the boundaries of each city separately. Each time, we draw a map for visual checks of the boundary (best way to see we have the city of Barcelona and not the province of Barcelona, for instance).

Antwerp - Belgium

Barcelona - Spain

London - UK

Örebro - Sweden

I got the boundaries for the tätort (city) Örebro from lantmateriet here. The documentation (in Swedish) gives the “MY_riks” layer where the 303 code represents tätort boundaries. The projection is SWEREF 99 TM. The original data is to big to be included here and I don’t own the data anyway.

Roma - Italy

I downloaded the shapefile for “Località italiane” from the Istituto nazionale di statistica at this link. It’s too big to be included in the Github repository and I don’t own the data anyway. The projection was ED50 / UTM zone 32N.

Vienna - Austria

Zürich - Switzerland.

Cycle paths in each city

Now we use OSM for finding cycle paths in each city, and then sum the distances of all paths. As Barcelona locals, we can see some cycle paths are missing, so the distances are most certainly under-estimation of actual cycling infrastructure. Who’s in for a mapathon?

Moreover, some tracks seem to have been geocoded twice with different labels but also different points so their distance is added twice to the sum.

Regarding labels for cycle paths, there’s an interesting article here that shows how complex it is. Here we use three labels: “cycleway-lane”, “cycleway-track” and “highway-cycleway”.

Now that we have made the queries, we’ll show the map and distances (in km).

cityshort distance_cycleway_lane distance_cycleway_track distance_highway_cycleway distance
Antwerpen 14.226315 151.927563 248.03143 414.18530
Barcelona 11.949352 3.237314 127.91439 143.10105
London 186.233883 113.868025 628.15516 928.25707
Oerebro NA 1.321230 297.15104 298.47227
Roma 1.549904 NA 94.43870 95.98860
Vienna 88.577559 26.919628 494.56911 610.06630
Zurich 41.063031 17.640361 40.85834 99.56173