圣盖博山脉的无路可达点
Poles of Inaccessibility in the San Gabriel Mountains

原始链接: https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/05/06_poles-of-inaccessibility-in-the-san-gabriel-mountains.html

为了利用 OpenStreetMap 数据识别道路和步道的“不可达极点”(Pole of Inaccessibility),作者采用了基于沃罗诺伊图(Voronoi diagram)的方法。尽管地球是一个具有不同地形的椭球体,但作者认为,对于帮助徒步旅行者寻找偏远地点这一预期目的而言,局部平面的近似处理已足够。 为实现这一目标,作者将地理数据投影到以查询区域为中心的切平面上。作者假定地球为球体,计算得出在如圣加布里埃尔山脉这样 80 公里宽的区域内,最大高程误差约为 125 米——该误差范围被认为在本项目中是可以接受的。因此,该方法有意忽略了椭球变形和复杂地形,以保持计算的简便性,并避免在定义“不可达性”时产生歧义。

Hacker News 上的一场讨论强调了圣盖博山脉中“难以到达极点”(Poles of Inaccessibility)的概念,即距离任何道路最远的点。一位评论者提到了“偏远项目”(Project Remote),这是一个由一个家庭发起的计划,他们徒步前往了美国每个州最偏远的地点。 令人惊讶的是,统计数据显示,堪萨斯州拥有全国“最不偏远”的极点,距离公路仅 0.8 英里。这一反直觉的发现挑战了评论者原本认为波士顿等人口稠密地区会最不偏远的假设。遗憾的是,该项目的网站似乎已经失效,在 2024 年末遭到垃圾信息重定向攻击。
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原文

OpenStreetMap has open data I can use to map out all the roads and trails. This is the input dataset.

For 2D geometry, the best approach to compute the Pole of Inaccessibility appears to be to construct a Voronoi diagram of the geometry we're trying to stay away from, and to find the Voronoi vertex corresponding to the furthest-away point.

Our world is not 2D. Instead, it has varying elevation sitting on top of an ellipsoid. The grand purpose here is to compute a location that hardy people can visit and to tell everybody they did it, so extreme accuracy is not required. Thus I claim that assuming the world is locally-flat and using the Voronoi-diagram-based method is sufficient. So I construct a plane that best describes my query area and project all my input points to this plane. I use a plane that is tangent to the Earth's surface at the center of the query area. This clearly wouldn't work if trying to find the pole of inaccessibility of something as large as an ocean, for instance, but it works here.

To compute the tangent plane, I assume the Earth is spherical. As I move along the tangent plane away from the point of tangency, the elevation error grows:

E = sqrt(Rearth2 + d2) - Rearth

The San Gabriels are about 80km across, and the tangent plane sits in the middle, so at worst d = 40km and the error is about 125m. That's plenty good enough. Plot (source):

plot_flat_earth_error.svg

I ignore the ellipsoid shape of the Earth outright. I ignore the topography as well, since including it in my distance metrics would require a fancier algorithm than making a Voronoi diagram, and it would make the notion of "inaccessibility" more ambiguous.

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