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Analysing pavement widths

Ordnance Survey (OS) and Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) recently completed a project exploring the creation of pavement widths data. The focus of this project was to support TfWM’s ongoing work in transport planning, road space reallocation and linear referencing.

Following on from the success of the TfWM project, this piece details the output from that work, illustrating the methodology that can be used to determine pavement widths. This methodology creates transects by using data from the OS National Geographic Database (NGD), accessed using OS’s new personalised and simplified OS Select+Build tool.

Pavement widths and the ability to measure them quickly and accurately has received increasing prominence in recent years. Research from Esri, using measurements from OS, revealed that most pavements in Great Britain were less than three metres wide, making it hard for people to socially distance during Covid-19.

However, the following methodology isn’t just suitable for pavements. Using OS data you can adapt this methodology to calculate widths of other features like rivers, roads and grass verges.

To simplify this the methodology has been broken down into three sections: Data, Published Parameters, and Method Overview. This method uses Feature Manipulation Engine, known as FME (it’s recommended that you have version 2020.0.1.0 or later) and OS NGD data.

OS NGD data is used because of its detailed attribution and ease of filtering pavements and paths from the Transport Features theme. The FME workbench uses OS data in a GeoPackage format.


How to access this OS data:

  1. Create a recipe in OS Select+Build on the OS Data Hub by expanding Transport theme > Transport Features > Road Track Or Path.

  2. Apply a filter to this data to include ‘Path’, ‘Path and Steps’, ‘Pavement’, ‘Pavement and Steps’.

  3. Create the recipe. You will then need to create a data package in a GeoPackage (GPKG) format (as this is what the FME workbench uses) for the area you require. We’ve used GeoPackage because of its plug-and-play nature, but other formats can be used if the workbench is adapted.

Create your recipe

If you’d like to access the detailed methodology and the FME workbench used for this project then please go to the OS GitHub page.

Two workbenches have been created. The first uses the FME 2020 release, and the second using FME 2022. This is due to a slight change in the transformers process between the versions.

For more information on OS Select+Build and the OS data available to developers, business, and government, visit the OS Data Hub.

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