From road centrelines to carriageways-A reconstruction algorithm

PLoS One. 2022 Feb 22;17(2):e0262801. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0262801. eCollection 2022.

Abstract

Roads are important for many urban planning applications, such as traffic modelling and delivery vehicle routing. At present, most available datasets represent roads only as centrelines. This is particularily true for OpenStreetMap which provides, among many features, road networks at worldwide coverage. Furthermore, most approaches for creating more detailed networks, such as carriageways or lanes, focus on doing so from sources that are not easy to acquire, such as satellite imagery or LiDAR scans. In this paper we present a methodology to create carriageways based on OpenStreetMap's centrelines and open access areal representations (i.e. polygons) to determine which roads should be represented as two individual carriageways. We applied our methodology in five areas across four different countries with different built environments. We analysed the outcome in a delivery routing problem to evaluate the validity of our results. Our results suggest that this method can be effectively applied to create carriageways anywhere in the world, as long as there is sufficient coverage by OpenStreetMap and an areal representation dataset of roads.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Automobile Driving
  • Built Environment / trends*
  • City Planning / methods*
  • Humans
  • Satellite Imagery
  • Transportation / methods*

Grants and funding

The research leading to this paper has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon2020 ERC Agreement no. 677312 UMnD: Urban modelling in higher dimensions which was granted to JS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.