🚧 Pedestrian Barriers Analysis
Identify roadway obstacles that may impact walkability around transit stations. This analysis detects highways and busy roads that create barriers to pedestrian access or unsafe walking conditions, helping assess how station connectivity and pedestrian safety is affected by the surrounding roadway network.
Pedestrian Barriers Analysis
About Pedestrian Barriers Analysis
This tool identifies and analyzes roadway infrastructure that can create barriers to pedestrian access around transit stations.
Barrier Types Analyzed:
- Motorways/Freeways: High-speed limited-access highways that are typically impossible for pedestrians to cross except at designated locations
- Trunk Roads: Major arterial roads with high traffic volumes and speeds, often with limited crossing opportunities
- Primary Roads: Principal roads that can present challenges due to width, traffic volume, and speed
The visualization shows these features within an 800-meter (½ mile) walking radius, using different colors to distinguish barrier types:
- Red: Motorways/Freeways (highest barrier)
- Orange: Trunk Roads (high barrier)
- Yellow: Primary Roads (moderate barrier)
How the Analysis Works:
This analysis uses computer vision to identify and measure major roads from OpenStreetMap satellite imagery. The process works as follows:
- Map Tile Retrieval: High-resolution satellite imagery is fetched from OpenStreetMap for the area within 800 meters of the station
- Color-Based Road Detection: OpenStreetMap renders different road types in distinct colors, which the computer vision system detects by analyzing the red, green, and blue (RGB) color values of each pixel in the image:
- Motorways appear in orange/red tones
- Trunk roads (arterials) are shown as orange roads with high capacity
- Primary roads appear as yellow roads connecting major destinations
- Area Calculation: The analysis measures the total land area occupied by each road type within the study area
Important Caveats:
- Text Label Interference: When OpenStreetMap places road names or labels directly on top of roadways in the imagery, those pixels are not counted as road surface, leading to an underestimate of the actual roadway width and total area. This means the measurements shown represent a conservative (lower-bound) estimate of road area.
- OpenStreetMap data quality varies by location—areas with more active mapping communities tend to have more accurate and up-to-date road classifications.
Why This Matters:
Transportation barriers near stations can make it difficult and dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists to travel to and from the station. Even with good street connectivity, major roads can force pedestrians to take circuitous routes, increasing walking time and reducing transit accessibility. The amount of land devoted to major roads, especially motorways, also reduces land available for development near stations or makes development uninviting or unsafe. Understanding these barriers helps identify:
- Areas where pedestrian infrastructure improvements are needed
- Locations requiring better crossing facilities (signals, overpasses, underpasses)
- Neighborhoods that may be physically isolated from transit despite being geographically close
- Equity concerns where barriers disproportionately affect certain communities