The Green Paths Route Planning Software for Exposure-Optimised Active Travel

Abstract

Green Paths is a prototype of route planning software for finding exposure-optimised routes for active travel. It incorporates external data on environmental exposures, including traffic noise levels, air quality, and street-level greenery into the street and paths network produced by the OpenStreetMap project. Written in the Python programming language, the software applies a novel environmental impedance function in the least cost path routing to find exposure-optimised routes. Routes for externally defined origin-destination pairs can be queried via a RESTful API. The API returns alternative routes equipped with rich exposure data. The published version of the software has been applied in population level environmental exposure assessment and in an end-user-oriented web-based route planner application designed for use in the Helsinki Metropolitan Area.

Keywords

• routing
• environmental exposure
• urban mobility
• travel
• walking
• cycling
• air quality
• traffic noise
• streetlevel greenery
• spatial analysis