Cool walks: a routing tool for pedestrians

Summers in Barcelona are hot and are becoming hotter due to climate change. Barcelona City Council has approved and is executing a Climate Plan to tackle climate change through multiple measures and objectives.

This routing tool for pedestrians is aligned with one of the lines of action in the Climate Plan: Line of action 3: preventing excessive heat.

With this objective in mind we have modeled direct sunlight and shades and developed a tool that creates optimal routes for heat prevention: seeking shady sidewalks, drinking fountains or places to take shelter.


How it works:

  • Pick the origin and destination of your walk

  • Pick the time of day

  • Shades between 10:00 and 10:30
  • Shades between 13:30 and 14:00
  • Shades between 17:00 and 17:30

  • Pick the route mode

  • Shortest path: I don't care about sunlight, I want to get there as soon as possible!
  • Shady path: I want to get there fast but staying cool
  • Vampire mode on: Avoid direct sunlight at all costs!

  • Are you thirsty?

  • Activate it to bring your route through a drinking fountain on your way

  • Need shelter?

  • Activate it to bring your route through a place to take shelter during high temperatures

  • Path results:

    Lighter colors are sunnier

Creative Commons Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional Licence.

Process information

All data used in this map comes from open datasets.

The pedestrian network has been built using sidewalks and pedestrian crossings from Carto BCN.

Daily shades have been modeled from LIDAR data available at the Cartography Geoportal from AMB.

The process also needs to account the shading under vegetation which was filtered by three datasets at Open Data BCN: Street trees, zone trees, and NDVI.


Finally we have also used several complimentary datasets from Open Data BCN: drinking fountains and a selection public equipments here, here or here.



Download the code and data (.7z file)

Map tiles made by Barcelona Regional.

Icons from QGIS and made by Freepik and Smashicons from www.flaticon.com.

Creative Commons Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Reconocimiento 4.0 Internacional Licence.