For GIS analysts, generating walksheds (a polygon representing all the locations a pedestrian can physically walk to in a given distance or time, not just a circle buffer) has often been a cumbersome process involving street network data preparation, pages of network analysis settings that mostly apply to cars, and long processing times. We decided to boil this process down to the basics with two compact, modular Python scripts. The first script uses OpenStreetMap’s Overpass API to quickly download a routable pedestrian walking network for a specified bounding box to a shapefile, GeoPackage, or File Geodatabase. The second script uses the QGIS Network Analysis toolbox to generate walksheds from the downloaded network and an input file of points, with settings for walk radius, detailed walkshed geometry tweaks, and a few extra aggregation options for transit stops. The end result is extremely fast, downloading the pedestrian network for the Portland metro area in a matter of minutes and generating individual walksheds in seconds.
