Prague Pleasant Walk

Prague elevation heatmap
Debugging algorithm of searching the lowest point in the area
Points of the hill-free route from home to Paralel Polis

Inspiration

Prague is a nice city, but a little bit hilly. If you like to walk you will go up to the hill or down to the hill almost all the time. Question is: Is it possible to find such route to any destination when you will go all the time down the hill or ride on public transport when you need to elevate? And Prague Pleasant Walk Project answers: YES (mostly)

What it does

With information about elevation across the city and Google maps API the Prague Pleasant Walk builds the route from point A to point B trying to escape walking up to the hill which will make possible to enjoy walking even for people with a special needs.

How we built it

We've built Python API which suggests the lowest and highest points in some areas from source and destination points, according to Merit DEM elevation database. The main project is implemented on PHP and utilise Google Maps API to build walking route to lowest point, then transit on public transport to highest point and then walking down route to the destination point. Open street maps and leaflet.js lib are used to visualise the final route

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge is lack of data. We were unable to find offline machine readable information about public transport stops in Prague. Also during the process we have discovered that our initial source of elevation data (open elevation API) is not accurate, so it requires a replacement with Merit DEM elevation database

What we learned

The main achievement is we have learned what on the Earth GeoTiff format is and how to use it to retrieve elevation data. Also we've introduced to leaflet.js library which allows you to build the custom maps