Popular Running Routes

Context

WalkJogRun (WJR) approached me looking to create a mapping tile server to overlay their vast collection of user-created running routes onto their existing mobile and web application. Over the course of the project, we saw that in some major cities, where there was a high density of running routes, the map started to show the safer and more scenic areas of the city for running, useful information for any runner new to the city.

Data

Over 1 million GPS tracked and time stamped running routes from WalkJogRun users over a five-year period.

Tech Notes

This project allowed me to build a solid and reusable infrastructure for serving up dynamically created map tiles with Mapnik from a PostGIS database.
Given the 54 million map tile requests and the 111GB of tile bandwidth on average each month, I found Fastly to be an excellent CDN solution for caching the tiles around the world.
The front-end is built using a Wax connector for handling the tile requests and Google Maps.
The back-end technologies include PostgreSQL, PostGIS, Mapnik, Node.js, and Express.
Black and yellow dot density map was created using data and image processing libraries in Python.

Live Demo

WalkJogRun Popular Routes