Quiet Roads for Road Cycling
A map of quiet, well-paved roads around Helsinki for road cycling, with the nearest train or metro station for each road.
I wanted to find quiet countryside roads with good asphalt that I can reach from Espoo by train or metro. Väylävirasto, the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency, publishes open data on the roads the state maintains. I used it to pick out roads around Helsinki.
A road is on the map if it meets all of these:
| Data | Limit |
|---|---|
| Surface | asphalt, including soft asphalt |
| Speed limit | 80 km/h or less |
| Traffic | 1000 vehicles a day or fewer |
| Pavement condition | class 3 or better, on a scale of 1 to 5 |
Darker blue roads score higher. Traffic counts most in the score, then pavement condition. Click a road to see its values and the straight-line distance to the nearest station. On an iPhone, use the Open the map link at the top for a bigger map.
Väylävirasto keeps each value as a stretch of road address: a road number, a road part and a distance along that part. Every point on the road lines carries its address too, so my Python pipeline cuts each road part wherever a value changes and gives each piece the values that cover it. If a piece gets two different values, for example one for each side of the road, it keeps the one that is worse for cycling.
The rail stations come from Fintraffic’s Digitraffic API. Its list includes some stations where no regular passenger train stops, such as Porvoo. I only count a station if a passenger train left it on the day of the weekly fetch. The metro stations come from HSL.