Jan. 18, 2024
This story is part of the "Tech Tools" series, created in collaboration with APA's Technology Division. From affordable housing and mobility to climate resilience and tools that help plan for uncertainty, we highlight topical datasets, applications, and other tools that help planners understand — and better plan for — their communities. The authors thank Lisa Nisenson and the American Planning Association Transportation Planning Division's Justin Porter, AICP, for their contributions to this article.
There is a growing call to action for cities to lower motor vehicle emissions and enhance the quality of life for pedestrians, bicyclists, and straphangers. Despite decades of complete streets guidance, however, incomplete data and a lack of affordable, up-to-date planning tools have hampered the ability of communities to identify and analyze multimodal network improvements, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation's 2022 report to Congress.
As existing tools become obsolete, planners need new tools to optimize and manage mobility systems in real time. Those tools can also help to meet multiple goals for mobility, land use, transportation, and access that address climate, congestion, health, and economic vitality. The landscape is also changing, as micromobility options replace short trips of three to five miles or less and transit's "last mile" radius widens, thanks to power-assisted bicycles and scooters. These shifts, though, require safe and convenient infrastructure supported by thoughtful land use, as well as data and tools that empower planners to create more informed, effective, and innovative transportation solutions.
5 free tools for multimodal planning
This article explores five free data sources and tools for multimodal planning, curated for you by members of APA's Technology Division.
Image courtesy Isabel Youngs.
OpenStreetMap
Data
OpenStreetMap (OSM) data can play a crucial role in achieving the goals of the 15-minute-city concept, where cities provide crucial services within a 15-minute walk or bike ride for all residents. OSM is a decades-long project, supported by a global community of volunteer mappers, that provides free map data from around the world. Up to 5 million contributions of local knowledge are made to OSM every day, and the data includes features and attributes such as road lanes and their speed limits; locations of trails, paths, and bus stops; bus routes; and much more. OSM is a valuable public resource, and dozens of major companies have leveraged the data to improve their products, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Uber, and Microsoft. There also is a rich ecosystem of resources for integrating OSM data into planning projects, ranging from raw downloads (Overpass Turbo and Geofabrik), open-source GIS (geographic information system) plug-ins (QuickOSM), and coding language packages for R (osmdata and osmplotr) and Python (OSMnx). Each of these resources allows planners to visualize, analyze, and interpret the street network and other physical features.
Cost: Free
Resource formats: Geospatial datasets
Coding skills required: No
Image courtesy Overture Maps Foundation.
Overture Maps Foundation
Data
Founded in late 2022, Overture Maps Foundation is a partnership of multiple technology companies that aims to provide free access to a variety of detailed place-based data, including Points of Interest (POIs), buildings, administrative boundaries, and transportation networks. Overture Maps incorporates data from OpenStreetMap and blends in additional data sources from contributors such as Esri and TomTom. After checking the accuracy of this data, Overture Maps organizes it in a way that's easier to connect and use, providing key benefits in the form of better reproducibility, data linkage, and scalability. For example, it makes connecting proprietary travel demand or curb management data to the street network efficient and allows it to be replicated across regions and cities using the same code. That means applications built using these tools are easier to share with others, as well as more adaptable to larger study areas or multiple projects.
Cost: Free
Resource formats: Geospatial datasets
Coding skills required: Yes (SQL)
Image from Wikimedia Commons.
QGIS
Application | Data | Visualizer | Resource Aggregator
QGIS is a widely used, open-source GIS desktop software. Similar to programs like ArcMap and ArcGIS Pro, QGIS empowers users to create, edit, visualize, analyze, and publish geospatial information. Its usefulness to multimodal planning is amplified by the nearly 2,000 plug-ins developed by its active user community. These plug-ins streamline analysis and visualization tasks. For example, the ORS Tools plug-in allows users to calculate and visualize travel times, connectivity, and accessibility across a network for a variety of travel modes (including bikes, e-bikes, walking, and wheelchairs). For transit-specific analysis, the GTFS-GO plug-in allows planners to import General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) data files into QGIS and neatly organize routes, stops, and even time-table calculations, enabling detailed public transit assessments.
Cost: Free
Resource formats: Geospatial data, tabular data, 3-D models, static maps, web maps
Coding skills required: No
Image courtesy Arc-Kepler.gl.
Kepler.gl
Data | Visualizer
To improve the multimodal network, it is important to study not only where people start and end trips, but also to assess their routes to find efficiencies. However, visualizing trip flows has historically been a difficult task. Trip data is often enormous, overlapping, and hard to interpret from static maps. Kepler.gl is an open-source, web-based application for visualizing geospatial data including trip flows. It can quickly render millions of points representing thousands of trips and group data based on location, making it easier to view trip patterns regardless of the size of the study area. These features help to drive better decision making and can be shared widely through URLs or HTML embeds. Kepler.gl also has a convenient widget library for use in Jupyter Notebooks, an interactive development environment.
Cost: Free
Resource formats: Geospatial
Coding skills required: No
Image courtesy Alta Planning + Design on behalf of Fargo-Moorhead Council of Governments using data from Replica.
FlowmapBlue
Data | Visualizer
Another tool for creating interactive transportation flows is FlowmapBlue. This open-source, web-based application enables planners to identify the starting and ending points of journeys. It works by using a simple template data structure to generate 2-D interactive maps. In FlowmapBlue, users can specify clustering levels and add animations, improving user experience. It also enables URL sharing and embedding for greater exposure and public engagement. There also is an open-source FlowmapBlue widget for the R programming language that can be used for developing customized applications through Shiny, an R package for building interactive web apps. Pairing the tool with Shiny allows users to filter data, observing how trip patterns change depending on underlying trip characteristics such as travel modes, trip distances, travel purposes, or demographics. This makes it easier for planners to make decisions that improve access based on community needs.
Cost: Free
Resource formats: Geospatial
Coding skills required: No
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