Saturday 17 March 2012

Finding hidden areas of remoteness

If I was ever lucky enough to be able to earn enough (unlikely) to afford a second home for vacations, I'd want it to be not too far from my primary residence (enabling weekend trips), close enough to activities (e.g. mountains for skiing), and as remote as possible - away from the noise of roads (and other people in general).

So what's the best way of finding such a place? It would be interesting to analyse map data (e.g. openstreetmap) for proximity to highways, roads, rail tracks and housing/urban areas, potentially finding "hidden" areas of remoteness near big cities. Such an analysis would have to subdivide the map into units of area (e.g. square miles) and iterate through all such units giving a score based on the weighted distance of the features such as roads. The radius of checked area for each unit of the map would also need to be set.

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