Square Surprises

Paris–Roubaix, also known as the Hell of the North, is one of cycling's five monuments and one of the most spectacular races of the season. Ask any professional which race they dream of winning at least once during their career, and Paris–Roubaix will be on top of that list.

This year's edition featured 30 cobbled sectors with a combined length of 54.8 km. Each sector receives a rating between one and five stars based on its length, unevenness, overall condition of the cobbles and location within the race. The mythical sectors deserving of a five-star rating are Trouée d'Arenberg, Mons-en-Pévèle and Carrefour de l'Arbre.

Unfortunately, those sectors not only attract fans. Arenberg forest had to deal with thieves taking pavé-shaped souvenirs back home for years, a privilege usually reserved for the winner of the race. In contrast, there are the Les Amis de Paris–Roubaix, the Friends of Paris–Roubaix, a group of enthusiasts dedicated to the preservation, restoration and maintenance of the iconic cobbled sectors.

poi

I like to explore the unknown roads around Leipzig, which can be adventurous at times. You tend to get a bit of everything: new, smooth tarmac, patched roads, gravel and sometimes even short cobblestone sections. I enjoy the ones I'd classify between one and three stars but recently hit a two-kilometer stretch of something well above that and swore to myself: never again, time to extend poi.

way
  ["highway"]
  ["surface"~"^(cobblestone|sett|cobblestone:flattened|unhewn_cobblestone)$"]
  (area);

The Overpass query above returns all roads with a cobblestone surface. The response contains over 100 MB of data, which is unfeasible to download every time the web app is opened. I stripped the metadata and used Google's polyline encoding for the paths. The result is a much leaner 6 MB file. poi then converts the raw data into GeoJSON and displays the roads in a nice purple color.

Here is what it looks like for Leipzig ¹. Clicking on a road opens a popup with a link to Google Maps. There you can use Street View to rate the sector yourself and decide whether it is pain or pleasure.