Tag: GIS

How to visualize the density of point data in a grid

A common way to show the distribution of places (like grocery stores) is to use a heat map. The map will appear “hotter” where there are many grocery stores and “colder” where there are few grocery stores. This kind of map can be useful to show gaps in distribution or a neighborhood that has a lot of grocery stores.

One issue with that kind of heat map is that the coverage areas change their shape and color if you zoom in, since the algorithm that clusters or determines what’s “nearby” or dense has fewer locations to analyze.

I prefer to use grids in the shape of square tiles, since Chicago is grid-oriented city and the vast majority of our streets and our routes move along east-west and north-south lines. The map above shows the location of subjects and topics of news articles in the Chicago Cityscape database.

I use PostGIS to set up most of my spatial data before visualizing it in QGIS.

This tutorial shows the two steps to using PostGIS to (1) create a grid based on an existing area (polygon), (2) assigning each point location to a tile in that grid and counting the number of locations in that tile.

If you don’t have PostGIS installed, you should install it if you work with spatial data a lot. It is much, much faster at performing most of the tasks you use QGIS or ArcGIS to perform. Both QGIS and ArcGIS can read and edit data stored in PostGIS.

Additionally, there is a function within QGIS that can create grids, and another function that can do comparisons by location and count/summarize, so all of this can be done without PostGIS.

For this tutorial, you will need a single polygon with which to create the grid. I used the boundary of the City of Chicago limits.

  1. Create a grid based on an existing area

1.a. Add a new function to PostGIS

To create a grid, you need a function that draws the tiles based on the polygon. I got this from The Spatial Database Advisor.

-- Create required type
DROP   TYPE IF EXISTS T_Grid CASCADE;
CREATE TYPE T_Grid AS (
  gcol  int4,
  grow  int4,
  geom geometry
);
-- Drop function is exists
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS ST_RegularGrid(geometry, NUMERIC, NUMERIC, BOOLEAN);
-- Now create the function
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION ST_RegularGrid(p_geometry   geometry,
                                          p_TileSizeX  NUMERIC,
                                          p_TileSizeY  NUMERIC,
                                          p_point      BOOLEAN DEFAULT TRUE)
  RETURNS SETOF T_Grid AS
$BODY$
DECLARE
   v_mbr   geometry;
   v_srid  int4;
   v_halfX NUMERIC := p_TileSizeX / 2.0;
   v_halfY NUMERIC := p_TileSizeY / 2.0;
   v_loCol int4;
   v_hiCol int4;
   v_loRow int4;
   v_hiRow int4;
   v_grid  T_Grid;
BEGIN
   IF ( p_geometry IS NULL ) THEN
      RETURN;
   END IF;
   v_srid  := ST_SRID(p_geometry);
   v_mbr   := ST_Envelope(p_geometry);
   v_loCol := trunc((ST_XMIN(v_mbr) / p_TileSizeX)::NUMERIC );
   v_hiCol := CEIL( (ST_XMAX(v_mbr) / p_TileSizeX)::NUMERIC ) - 1;
   v_loRow := trunc((ST_YMIN(v_mbr) / p_TileSizeY)::NUMERIC );
   v_hiRow := CEIL( (ST_YMAX(v_mbr) / p_TileSizeY)::NUMERIC ) - 1;
   FOR v_col IN v_loCol..v_hiCol Loop
     FOR v_row IN v_loRow..v_hiRow Loop
         v_grid.gcol := v_col;
         v_grid.grow := v_row;
         IF ( p_point ) THEN
           v_grid.geom := ST_SetSRID(
                             ST_MakePoint((v_col * p_TileSizeX) + v_halfX,
                                          (v_row * p_TileSizeY) + V_HalfY),
                             v_srid);
         ELSE
           v_grid.geom := ST_SetSRID(
                             ST_MakeEnvelope((v_col * p_TileSizeX),
                                             (v_row * p_TileSizeY),
                                             (v_col * p_TileSizeX) + p_TileSizeX,
                                             (v_row * p_TileSizeY) + p_TileSizeY),
                             v_srid);
         END IF;
         RETURN NEXT v_grid;
     END Loop;
   END Loop;
END;
$BODY$
  LANGUAGE plpgsql IMMUTABLE
  COST 100
  ROWS 1000;

The ST_RegularGrid function works in the same projection as your source data.

1.b. Create a layer that has all of the tiles for just the Chicago boundary

--This creates grids of 1,320 feet square (a 2x2 block size in Chicago)
SELECT gcol, grow, geom
 into b_chicagoboundary_grid_1320squared
 FROM ST_RegularGrid((select geom from chicagoboundary where gid = 1), 1320, 1320,FALSE);

In that query, “1320” is a distance in feet for both the X and Y planes, as the “chicagoboundary” geometry is projected in Illinois StatePlane FIPS East (Feet) (EPSG/SRID 3435).

2. Assign each point location to a tile in that grid and count the number of locations in each tile

Now you’ll need a table that has POINT-type geometries in it. For the map in this tutorial, I used a layer of location-based news articles that are used in Chicago Cityscape to highlight local developments.

SELECT grid.id, count(*) as count, grid.geom
INTO news_grid
FROM news_articles, b_chicagoboundary_grid_1320squared AS grid
WHERE st_intersects(news_articles.geom, grid.geom)
GROUP by grid.id;

This query will result in a table with three columns:

  1. The ID of the tile, which is a primary key field.
  2. The number of news articles in that tile.
  3. The POLYGON geometry of that tile.
Look at these two maps (the one above, and the one below). The first map shows the whole city. The tiles are colored according to the number of news articles within the area of each tile. The darker the blue, the more news articles within that tile.
This map is zoomed in to the Woodlawn area. As you change scale (zoom in or zoom out), the size of the “heat” area (the size of each tile) doesn’t change – they are still 1,320 feet by 1,320 feet. The color doesn’t change either. The typical heat map doesn’t have these advantages.

The genius of using ST_Subdivide to speed up PostGIS intersection comparisons

You should use ST_Subdivide to break up large shapes into smaller ones

This infographic visually compares the difference between running a PostGIS comparison query like ST_Intersects on a large shape versus a subdivided version of that large shape. Click to embiggen.

Hundreds of GIS intersection comparisons are completed every hour on Chicago Cityscape.*

People are looking at, say, a map of the South Shore community area. That “Place” page then grabs all of the building permits, building violations, business licenses, and other “feature layers” that are stored as points.

A classic “point in polygon” comparison is made using the ST_Intersects(place_geometry, permits_geometry) function.

This has worked very well for several years.

The problem

But as Chicago Cityscape handles larger shapes – they come from users drawing their own, large shapes, and from large shapes like the downtown Chicago area – this query doesn’t cut it.

Setting indexes on the geometry is imperative, but it’s not the end of the to optimize performance. That’s because the index of the geometry is a rectangular bounding box (which is also called an “envelope” in GIS) that contains the entire shape of the South Shore community area.

The downtown Chicago area, however, is not even the largest shape I have. That belongs to the new Place, “Neighborhood Opportunity Fund investment zones” (NOF). Combined, they cover 75 square miles of Chicago. Downtown is only 7.7 square miles.

After I added the NOF map and tested its Place page, it “crashed” my server, metaphorically speaking. The query to just count the number of building permits in the area would take about five minutes.

There had to be a better way; in the meantime, however, I divided the NOF map into the West and South sections. This hardly improved the counting time.

The solution

Thankfully, today, I saw a tweet from Paul Ramsey linking to his blog that linked to his slides from a recent presentation about the use of PostgreSQL to store and manipulate GIS data.

In it he explained how the ST_Subdividefunction worked. I’m going to demonstrate it using graphics from my own maps.

A normal intersection comparison, using ST_Intersects(place_geometry, permits_geometry) in a query creates a bounding box (envelope) around each geometry and quickly determines whether the two envelopes overlap. If they do, then it checks again to see if the actual geometries overlap. If they do, that data is returned as a response to your query.

When your two datasets are massive, like the NOF zones, which collectively cover 1/3rd of Chicago, and the building permits, which are found across the entire city…well, that led to the five minutes counting time.

Enter ST_Subdivide. To use it properly you would run it against your existing geometry and store the much smaller shapes, derived from the big shape, in a new table. I applied the function to all the 22,203 maps that Chicago Cityscape has and stored their unique IDs and subdivided geometries in a new “lookup” table.

Now, any time I want to compare the building permits against the NOF, the building permits are instead compared to the small shapes that were subdivided.

The query

Chicago Cityscape uses a single table (created as a materialized view) to combine all 22,203 maps. Each map is stored in a source table (for example, there’s a table to hold the 77 community areas) and the materialized view runs once a day to combine all of the maps in the source tables. This ensures our data is managed well: different source tables can hold different information, and the single table holds only the name, type, and geometry of the source tables, for faster comparison. Each entry in the single table also has a “slug”, its unique identifier.

Thus, the materialized view of the subdivided maps is created from the aforementioned single table, using this query:

create materialized view view_places_subdivided as
select gid || '_' || random() as gid, slug, st_subdivide(geom) as geom
from view_places;

The “gid” is designed to create a new unique ID field, as the slug field will be repeated for every subdivided of each map. A unique ID field is necessary if you want to refresh the materialized view concurrently (to allow for other queries to access the materialized view while it’s being refreshed).

* The results are cached for a few hours, because the feature layers change 1-2 times per day and at different times each day, so the limited duration cache accommodates that. Ideally I would code a way to invalidate the cache when the feature layer data is updated.

Update 12/31/19: ST_Subdivide will fail if your geometries have any or certain geometry errors (I don’t know if it’s any kind of error, or certain kinds of errors that make the function fail). Chicago Cityscape has over 37,000 features that ST_Subdivide is attempting to process, and there is a lot of room for error in managing that many features from dozens of sources.

Use Turf to perform GIS functions in a web browser

Turf's merge function joins invisible buffers around each Divvy station into a single, super buffer.

Turf’s merge function joins invisible buffers around each Divvy station into a single, super buffer –all client-side, in your web browser.

I’m leading the development of a website for Slow Roll Chicago that shows the distribution of bike lane infrastructure in Chicago relative to key and specific demographics to demonstrate if the investment has been equitable.

We’re using GitHub to store code, publish meeting notes, and host discussions with the issues tracker. Communication is done almost entirely in GitHub issues. I chose GitHub over Slack and Google Groups because:

  1. All of our research and code should be public and open source so it’s clear how we made our assumptions and came to our conclusions (“show your work”).
  2. Using git, GitHub, and version control is a desirable skill and more people should learn it; this project will help people apply that skill.
  3. There are no emails involved. I deplore using email for group communication.*

The website focuses on using empirical research, maps, geographic analysis to tell the story of bike lane distribution and requires processing this data using GIS functions. Normally the data would be transformed in a desktop GIS software like QGIS and then converted to a format that can be used in Leaflet, an open source web mapping library.

Relying on desktop software, though, slows down development of new ways to slice and dice geographic data, which, in our map, includes bike lanes, wards, Census tracts, Divvy stations, and grocery stores (so far). One would have to generate a new dataset if our goals or needs changed .

I’ve built maps for images and the web that way enough in the past and I wanted to move away from that method for this project and we’re using Turf.js to replicate many GIS functions – but in the browser.

Yep, Turf makes it possible to merge, buffer, contain, calculate distance, transform, dissolve, and perform dozens of other functions all within the browser, “on the fly”, without any software.

After dilly-dallying in Turf for several weeks, our group started making progress this month. We have now pushed to our in-progress website a map with three features made possible by Turf:

  1. Buffer and dissolving buffers to show the Divvy station walk shed, the distance a reasonable person would walk from their home or office to check out a Divvy station. A buffer of 0.25 miles (two Chicago blocks) is created around each of the 300 Divvy stations, hidden from display, and then merged (dissolved in traditional GIS parlance) into a single buffer. The single buffer –called a “super buffer” in our source code – is used for another feature. Currently the projection is messed up and you see ellipsoid shapes instead of circles.
  2. Counting grocery stores in the Divvy station walk shed. We use the “feature collection” function to convert the super buffer into an object that the “within” function can use to compare to a GeoJSON object of grocery stores. This process is similar to the “select by location” function in GIS software. Right now this number is printed only to the console as we look for the best way to display stats like this to the user. A future version of the map could allow the user to change the 0.25 miles distance to an arbitrary distance they prefer.
  3. Find the nearest Divvy station from any place on the map. Using Turf’s “nearest” function and the Context Menu plugin for Leaflet, the user can right-click anywhere on the map and choose “Find nearby Divvy stations”. The “nearest” function compares the place where the user clicked against the GeoJSON object of Divvy stations to select the nearest one. The problem of locating 2+ nearby Divvy stations remains. The original issue asked to find the number of Divvy stations near the point; we’ll likely accomplish this by drawing an invisible, temporary buffer around the point and then using “within” to count the number of stations inside that buffer and then destroy the buffer.

Right-click the map and select "Find nearby Divvy stations" and Turf will locate the nearest Divvy station.

Right-click the map and select “Find nearby Divvy stations” and Turf will locate the nearest Divvy station.

* I send one email to new people who join us at Open Gov Hack Night on Tuesdays at the Mart to send them a link to our GitHub repository, and to invite them to a Dropbox folder to share large files for those who don’t learn to use git for file management.

How many miles of roads are in your ward?

Screenshot 1: Showing how some streets are not being counted. There should be a yellow section of road between the two existing yellow road sections. 

A friend recently asked me how many blocks of road are in his ward. He wanted to know so that he could measure how many blocks of streets would have an older style of street lighting after X number of blocks receive the new style of street lighting. For this project, I used two datasets from Chicago’s open data portal: street center lines and wards. The output data is not very accurate as there may be some overlap and some uncounted street segments; this is likely due to a shortcoming in my process. I will show you how to find the number of blocks per ward using QGIS (download Quantum GIS, a free program for all OSes).

Here’s how I did it

  1. Load in the two datasets. Wards and street center lines (zipped shapefiles). They are projected in EPSG:3435.
  2. Exclude several road classifications in the street center lines by querying only for "CLASS" > '1' AND "CLASS" < '5'. The data dictionary for the road classifications is at the end. We don’t want the river, sidewalks, expressways, and any ramps to be included in the blocks per ward analysis.
  3. Intersect. In QGIS, select Vector>Geoprocessing Tools>Intersect. The input vector layer is “Transportation” (the name of the street center lines dataset) and the intersect layer is “Wards”. Save the resulting shapefile as “streets intersect wards”. Click OK. This will take a while.
  4. Add the “streets intersect wards” shapefile to the table of contents.
  5. You’ll notice some of the issues with the resulting shapefile: missing street segments (see screenshot 1). What should QGIS do if a street is a ward boundary?
  6. Obtain street length information, part 1. Remove all the columns in the “streets intersect wards” shapefile that have something to do with geometry. These are now outdated and will confuse you when you add a geometry column generated by QGIS.
  7. Obtain street length information, part 2. With the “streets intersect wards” shapefile selected in the table of contents, select Vector>Geometry Tools>Export/Add geometry columns. Select “streets intersect wards” shapefile as your input layer, leave CRS as “Layer CRS” and save as new shapefile “streets intersect wards geom”.
  8. Add the “streets intersect wards geom” shapefile to the table of contents.
  9. You will see a new column at the end of the attribute table called LENGTH. Since the data is projected in EPSG:3435 (Illinois StatePlane NAD83 East Feet), the unit is feet.
  10. Simply export “streets intersect wards geom” to a CSV file and open the CSV file in a spreadsheet application. From there you can group the data by Ward number and add the street lengths together. (I thought it would be faster to do this in a database so I imported it into a localhost MySQL database and ran a simple query, SELECT wardNum, sum(`chistreets_classes234`.`LENGTH`) as sum FROM chistreets_classes234 WHERE ward > 0 group by wardNum. I then exported this to a spreadsheet to convert feet to miles.)

Because of the errors described in step 5, you shouldn’t use this analysis for any application where accuracy is important. There are road lengths missing in the output dataset (table with street lengths summed by ward) and I cannot tell if the inaccuracy is equally distributed.

[table id=7 /]

Wards 19 (south side) and 41 (Norwood Park, including O’Hare airport) have the highest portion of street length in the city.

Screenshot 2: Ward 41 is seen. 

Street data dictionary

Column is “CLASS”. The value is a string. This dataset lacks alleys. Adapted from the City’s data dictionary.

1. Expressway

2. Arterials (1 mile grid, no diagonals)

3. Collectors (includes diagonals)

4. Other streets (side streets, neighborhood streets)

5. Named alleys (mostly downtown, like Couch Place and Garland Place)

7. Tiered (lower level streets, including LaSalle, Michigan, Columbus, and Wacker)

9. Ramps (goes along with expressway)

E. Extent (not sure how to describe these; includes riverwalk and lake walk segments, and Navy Pier, also includes some streets, like Mies van der Rohe Way)

RIV. River

S. Sidewalk

99. Unclassified

Get out of Googleville: my presentation on web mapping

Alternate headlines: Google Maps versus OpenStreetMap; why OpenStreetMap is better than Google Maps

I presented to the Chicago GIS Network Meetup group on February 5,2013, about alternatives to Google when it comes to mapping on the web. I created the presentation and outline a couple hours before giving it and came up with this slideshow with three frames.

Googleville 1 of 3

Google Maps and its data is a one-way street (or many one-way streets). Google will take data but won’t give it back.

Googleville 2 of 3

Google Maps has all of these features, but they’re easier to manipulate when you use an alternative. Alternatives like: MapBox, TileMill, OpenLayers, OpenStreetMap (made easy with JOSM), GeoCommons – I’m sure there are plenty more.

Googleville 3 of 3

OpenStreetMap is the Wikipedia of online mapping and geographic data. Considering switching to OSM.