Introduction

The goal of this tutorial is to introduce you to some open source technologies that can be used to get a better understanding of walkability and bikability.

There are four parts of the tutorial which can be worked on (mostly) in any order. If you want to focus on one in particular, then that’s fine.

The sections of the tutorial are as follows:

Installing and running NetAScore

In this part of the tutorial, you will be guided through the process of running NetAScore on your own machine. By the end of it, you will have got an instance up and running, and used it to create bikability and walkability information for Glasgow. For those wanting to get more in depth, you will also be instructed as to how to do the same for a region that you define yourself, either by place name or through providing your own OSM input file.

Installing and running a local instance of openrouteservice

For this part of the tutorial, the goal is to have your very own instance of openrouteservice running on your machine. You will be instructed on how to get the instance running, where different things are located in the folder structure, and how to change configurations to be have different features running. By the end of the section, you will be able to query this local instance and get results for different routing tasks such as reachability and directions.

Interpreting bikeability and walkability in QGIS

Using the openrouteservice QGIS plugin and a special public openrouteservice instance, this section will show you how you can include openrouteservice results in QGIS, in particular routes that take into account bikability and walkability. Using these results, you will be able to make assessments as to whether specific areas (e.g. a city district) are walkable or not.

Integrating results from NetAScore into openrouteservice

This part of the tutorial is for those people who have managed to get openrouteservice and NetAScore running on their local machines, and would like to bring the two together. You will be guided through the process of downloading OSM data and then putting this into both NeAScore and openrouteservice. We further guide you through converting the NetAScore output into a format compatible with openrouteservice, before integrating this data into openrouteservice so that you can do your own routing processes that take into account walkability and bikeability metrics.