I’m pleased to share the completion of a recent commercial engagement with the Heart Foundation: the Community Walkability Map, a new interactive tool designed to help communities understand and advocate for more walkable, healthier neighbourhoods.

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About the Project

The Heart Foundation has a longstanding commitment to environments that support heart health, physical activity, and healthy living. As part of this mission, they commissioned a user-friendly platform that visualises pedestrian access to everyday destinations – empowering residents, advocates, and planners alike to identify opportunities for improvement in the built environment.

The map allows users to drop a pin anywhere in Australia and visualise accessible destinations within 5, 10, 15, and 20-minute walk catchments. These walkability catchments are not based solely on distance – they account for real-world walking conditions including path connectivity, barriers such as highways, and signal timing delays.

This map is now a central feature of the Heart Foundation’s Community Walkability website, which also includes community checklists, fact sheets, planning guides, and a Supporters’ Toolkit for professionals in the built environment sector.

A Data-Driven Tool for Policy and Advocacy

A key innovation of this project is the integration of traffic signal delay-aware isochrone modelling – a methodology that highlights delays to people walking at crossings, often overlooked in conventional walking catchment calculations.

Built using open-source OpenStreetMap data, the tool translates complex urban transport data into an intuitive, map-based interface that supports both strategic communication and policy engagement.

From a technical perspective, I led all aspects of the solution design and delivery, including:

• Co-design and scoping with the Heart Foundation team
• Project management and delivery oversight, using an incremental approach with regular status updates
• Backend isochrone algorithm development, implementing signal delay estimation
• Geospatial data integration and transformation
• Serverless backend development
• Graphic design
• Frontend software engineering

The end result is a tool that blends open data, urban analytics, and visual storytelling to support healthier, more walkable communities.

Data Sources

The map’s core walkability modelling is based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Where possible, users are encouraged to contribute updates to OSM or via the Mapbox contribution portal.

Additional datasets integrated under agreement with the Heart Foundation include:

• Street lighting data from Ausgrid and Citipower
• Tree canopy coverage from the NSW DPHI (CC BY 4.0)
• Traffic signal delay data from Better Intersections (ODbL licensed), supplemented with interpolation or estimated averages in data-sparse areas

Users can explore data attributions directly via the map interface and are welcome to contribute additional signal timing measurements here.

Reflections

It was a pleasure to work closely with Anna Gurnhill and the broader Heart Foundation team throughout this project. Their vision, clarity of purpose, and genuine commitment to creating healthier, more accessible communities made this a rewarding collaboration.

What’s Next?

If you have an interesting challenge in the urban analytics, planning or community consultation space and would like to collaborate – let’s chat.

You can also read more about my background, including my five years as a full-stack engineer at Atlassian, open source work and policy advocacy here. I’ll have more to share on a new commercial entity soon.

I’m looking to further explore the potential of traffic signal-aware isochrone analysis to quantify urban accessibility and support data-driven planning and placemaking initiatives.

I’m particularly interested in applying similar methodologies to cycling network analysis.

I retain ownership of the underlying IP developed in this project and am open to discussing its further application in other domains.

This blog post has been reviewed with the client before publication.

The post Introducing the Heart Foundation’s Community Walkability Map first appeared on Jake Coppinger.

Map live at SydneyAdvertisingMap.com. See also: Max Bo’s analysis of how many placed next to Telstra telephones: https://observablehq.com/@mjbo/sydney-qms-panel-public-telephone-pairings

If you live in Sydney you will have seen them – the 86 inch advertising screens in the City of Sydney Council. These advertising panels are known as communication pylons in the language of the developer approvals. The Sydney Morning Herald reported the City of Sydney paused the rollout due to community backlash.

Through August and October I visited every QMS advertising panel in the City of Sydney. I surveyed their location and ref code to add to OpenStreetMap, an open geospatial database that powers many maps worldwide. I uploaded photos of many displays to Mapillary, a platform for openly licensed street imagery, which you can view by clicking on pins in the map above.

Travelling on foot and by bike I found many examples of this street furniture blocking footpaths and reducing pedestrian amenity.

I hope this open data, map and photographs encourages and enables further public discussion, such as where problematic panels are located, and what role large format outdoor advertising has on Sydney’s streets.

If you find any screens that aren’t on this list, or any data is incorrect, please comment below or send an email to jake@jakecoppinger.com with “QMS” in the title. If you’re interested, you can head to OpenStreetMap.org and contribute yourself!

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Website

I created SydneyAdvertisingMap.com to visualise this data. It is open source on Github (GPLv3), and displays the data in an easy to understand form.

As of October 31:

• There are 144 mapped panels QMS panels (excluding bus shelters) in the City of Sydney (https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1nbB)
• 30 panels do not have a ref code mounted on them (https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1nbC)

Panel placement

Most panels are placed on footpaths in the direction of pedestrian and car flow. They are placed nearest the road.

Many panels are placed next to an existing Telstra public telephone (though many are not). In these cases, the City of Sydney information side is facing the Telephone, and obstructed by the telephone. The commercial advertising side is always unobstructed by the telephone. I also surveyed nearby telephones on OSM while surveying the panels – I have not yet queried the percentage of panels near a telephone but this is possible. Edit: See Max Bo’s analysis of how many are placed next to telephones: https://observablehq.com/@mjbo/sydney-qms-panel-public-telephone-pairings

In their 2007 survey of Sydney’s street life, Gehl Architects noted the amount of footpath clutter caused by the public phones. This issue has seemingly not been resolved.

The pay phones obviously serve two purposes. One is the service of offering the inhabitants a public phone another is to place commercial ads in the City Centre to be viewed by people passing by. In order to place these ads in the best viewable way the pay phones are installed facing the footpath and thus blocking pedestrian movement in a number of streets.

“Public Spaces – Public Life, Sydney”, Gehl Architects 2007, Part 1, Page 58

Some panels are placed where a City of Sydney kiosk used to be. You can see the outside of the distinctive kiosk shape on the pavement in a couple of areas. The removal of the kiosk is also a reduction in pedestrian amenity.

The ref code is on a silver coloured metal plaque on the inside of one of the legs. Some screens are missing a ref code – I am unsure what the development approval status of these are.

Examples of screens blocking footpaths

Advertising screens obstructing seating views

Further reading

• Sydney Morning Herald series: https://www.smh.com.au/topic/qms-19c

• “QMS Reveals First City of Sydney Communication Panels”, QMS Media, 1st June 2022. qmsmedia.com/qms-reveals-first-city-of-sydney-communication-panels/
• Clover Moore’s update on street furniture and advertising panels: linkedin.com/posts/clovermooresydney_i-want-to-give-you-an-update-on-city-of-sydneys-activity-6982951529779527680-1jys

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Appendix: OpenStreetMap survey method

To identify the streets and neighbourhoods the panels would likely be I looked through development approval documents.

I then methodically visited each street, either on foot or on bicycle. I added each advertising panel to OpenStreetMap with the following tags:

advertising=poster_box
animated=screen
lit=yes
operator=QMS
operator:website=https://www.qmsmedia.com/
sides=2
support=ground
ref=...
mapillary=...

(If you have a suggestion for better tags please let me know!)

I took photos of many of these panels, which I uploaded to Mapillary. I also added the Mapillary image ID to the advertising panel nodes.

Some screens are missing a ref code, for these I set ref=none. I set ref=unknown where I forgot to survey a ref code (only one or two).

Appendix: Geospatial data

Download geospatial data of QMS ad panels (surveyed by me, under ODbL licence). This is already out of date, fetch the latest at https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1nbB

• As Geojson
• As gpx
• As kml

The post Mapping Sydney Billboards: Every QMS advertising panel in Sydney first appeared on Jake Coppinger.