11. Tutorial datasets

Our tutorial examples rely on two OSM spatial layers covering the Tel Aviv Metropolitan Area (TAMA), defined by a boundary polygon encompassing approximately 1,500 sq. km, paired with two national GTFS databases covering all of Israel. The TAMA buildings and roads were extracted from raw data downloaded from Geofabrik (https://download.geofabrik.de/asia/israel-and-palestine.html). The 200 MB zip file containing the entire region includes several distinct layers; we utilized gis_osm_buildings_a_free_1 for the buildings and gis_osm_roads_free_1 for the road network. Raw OSM layers inherently use the global EPSG:4326 (WGS84) coordinate reference system, which relies on latitude/longitude degrees. To ensure precise distance and area calculations, we reprojected these layers into the localized Israeli Transverse Mercator (ITM) coordinate system (a local adaptation of UTM Zone 36N). Using QGIS spatial selection tools, we isolated the buildings and road links falling strictly within the TAMA polygon. The resulting TAMA dataset contains roughly 257,000 buildings and 143,000 road links. For faster tests, we also constructed a significantly smaller dataset restricted strictly to the Tel Aviv city limits (51 sq. km), containing 27,000 buildings and 17,000 road links.

Each of these zip files contains pre-configured QGIS project files (TAMA.qgz and TLV.qgz). We strongly advise opening these project files to familiarize yourself with the layers before running the tools. In addition to the initial layers of roads and buildings we supply topologically cleaned versions of these layers, for both TAMA and Tel Aviv datasets. The required public transport data is supplied as gtfs2018.zip (102 MB) and gtfs2024.zip (142 GB).

To get started with one of the sample projects:

  1. Extract the project ZIP file. All necessary files and map layers will be located in the resulting folder.

  2. Copy the GTFS data folder into this new project folder (not necessarily, yet convenient).

  3. Open the QGIS project file (TLV.qgz or TAMA.qgz), and you are ready to begin!

Note

Your latest settings are saved as defaults for future calculations in the parameters_accessibility.txt file in the project’s folder. The system will automatically recreate this file if it is deleted.