How I built a production-ready system that creates accurate digital basemaps of urban road networks — the foundation for measuring real travel times across Israel's major cities.
Developed for the Ministry of Transport's Transport Planning Division, in partnership with the Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan Team (JTMT) and in collaboration with Eng. Marcus Szeinuk and Dr. Ido Klein.
“Every travel-time measurement is only as good as the map underneath it. This system makes sure that map is right.”
To measure how traffic really flows through a city, you first need a precise digital map of every road segment — in each direction of travel. Off-the-shelf maps aren't accurate enough for that. So I built a system that creates these 'basemaps' from scratch, for Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and Be'er Sheva.
At the start of the process, the city's road network is loaded and broken down into directed segments — a two-way street becomes two separate one-way links, each with its own unique ID.
Each segment is then compared against real-world driving routes. The system automatically measures how well the two geometries match, and flags every mismatch.
A dedicated visual review interface lets an analyst inspect each flagged segment on an interactive map, fix it with a few clicks — adjust endpoints, add waypoints, re-check — and approve it. Keyboard shortcuts make reviewing hundreds of segments fast.
The result: a validated, export-ready basemap that feeds the national travel-time measurement system.
A walkthrough of the basemap creation and review workflow.
I built this entire system — the data processing, the interactive review interface, the automated test suite, and the production deployment — using AI-native development workflows with tools like Claude and Codex. AI didn't just write code snippets; it powered the full cycle: architecture, implementation, automated testing, and production hardening. This is exactly the workflow I teach in my AI lectures and consulting.
Transport agencies make multi-million shekel decisions based on travel-time data. An inaccurate basemap silently corrupts every measurement built on top of it. This system turns a months-long manual mapping effort into a fast, repeatable, quality-controlled process — already in production use across four metropolitan areas.
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