List of Ontario road names

Question

Where can I find a list of all roads in Ontario?

I'm looking for a publicly available list, such as a website or downloadable PDF/spreadsheet. The intended audience aren't GIS professionals, so a GIS layer wouldn't be suitable.

Example use case:

Find all the roads in Ontario that have the word marble in their names.

Answer 1

If there is no publicly available list, let's prepare it :). The best source will be OSM Data (http://download.geofabrik.de/north-america/canada.html) from where we will take a bit. In below example I'm using R and osmextract package. Full list of available attributes for roads in OSM you can find under link https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway.

Let's load the library and create subdirectory for files storage:

library(osmextract)
if (!dir.exists("data")) {
  dir.create("data")
}

Let's check, if there is a subset of data or Ontario

on <- oe_match(place = "Ontario")
#> The input place was matched with: Ontario

Let's download the file (here I'm using wget for download).

download.file(
  url = on$url, 
  destfile = "data/ontario-latest.osm.pbf",
  method = "wget",
  extra = "-c"
  )

In below steps we are extracting the necessary "layers" of geospatial data for further analysis:

oe_vectortranslate(
  file_path = "data/ontario-latest.osm.pbf",
  layer = "lines",
  extra_tags = c("highway", "name")
  )

oe_vectortranslate(
  file_path = "data/ontario-latest.osm.pbf",
  layer = "multipolygons",
  extra_tags = c("boundary", "admin_level")
)

Let's read the highways (roads) from the data file:

highways <- oe_read(
  file_path = "data/ontario-latest.osm.pbf",
  layer = "lines", 
  query = "SELECT osm_id, highway, name, geometry FROM lines WHERE highway IS NOT NULL"
  )
#> Simple feature collection with 1135393 features and 3 fields
#> Geometry type: LINESTRING
#> Dimension:     XY
#> Bounding box:  xmin: -95.36875 ymin: 41.72912 xmax: -74.32076 ymax: 56.13301
#> Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84

This step is just for fun. Analyzing spatial data without drawing it is like decaffeinated coffee.

boundary <- oe_read(
  file_path = "data/ontario-latest.osm.pbf",
  layer = "multipolygons", 
  query = "SELECT osm_id, name, geometry FROM multipolygons \
             WHERE boundary = 'administrative' AND admin_level = '4'"
)

#> Simple feature collection with 1 feature and 2 fields
#> Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON
#> Dimension:     XY
#> Bounding box:  xmin: -95.15602 ymin: 41.67656 xmax: -74.32011 ymax: 56.86135
#> Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84


boundary |>
  sf::st_geometry() |>
  plot()

highways |>
  subset(highway %in% c("motorway", "primary")) |>
  sf::st_geometry() |>
  plot(col = "blue", add = TRUE)

Now, only the roads, which you are interested in:

highways |>
  subset(grepl("marble", name, ignore.case = TRUE))

#> Simple feature collection with 49 features and 3 fields
#> Geometry type: LINESTRING
#> Dimension:     XY
#> Bounding box:  xmin: -79.82654 ymin: 43.40498 xmax: -75.28377 ymax: 45.54217
#> Geodetic CRS:  WGS 84
#> First 10 features:
#>         osm_id      highway                 name                       geometry
#> 3950   5064974 unclassified     Marble Rock Road LINESTRING (-76.1998 44.373...
#> 4975   5379107  residential Marble Arch Crescent LINESTRING (-79.29217 43.73...
#> 4977   5379116  residential Marble Arch Crescent LINESTRING (-79.29426 43.73...
#> 7042   9397164  residential      Marblehead Road LINESTRING (-79.55451 43.69...
#> 31503 28615578  residential   Marblethorne Court LINESTRING (-79.59533 43.64...
#> 39875 31382638  residential         Marble Place LINESTRING (-79.48716 44.06...
#> 56675 33852914  residential  Marblehead Crescent LINESTRING (-79.74659 43.73...
#> 61350 33873128  residential  Marbleseed Crescent LINESTRING (-79.75081 43.75...
#> 88686 33974318  residential         Marble Court LINESTRING (-77.66915 44.46...
#> 91993 33979087     tertiary    Marble Point Road LINESTRING (-77.69978 44.48...

To write it down (without geometries) you can use write.csv() function, like:

highways |>
  sf::st_drop_geometry() |>
  subset(grepl("marble", name, ignore.case = TRUE)) |>
  write.csv(file = "data/marble_roads.csv")

To add other attributes, like number of lanes, surface just modify extra_tags = c("highway", "name") in oe_vectortranslate() and then modify the query in highways <- oe_read(...) chunk.

Regards, Grzegorz

^{Created on 2022-10-04 with reprex v2.0.2}