I have health issues that make avoiding steep streets important for me. The problem with topo maps is that it's a pain in the ass to read them, specially in areas with lots of features, such as cities.

I like color-coded height maps, they can give you an intuitive feel for how a city lies on top of its terrain. It's very hard to make out moderate slopes though, e.g. if the city has high hills. I would most prefer a color-coded map showing the gradient.

Incidentally, if anyone has pointers to where this kind of map could be obtained (mostly for european cities in my case, but any resource would be helpful), I would appreciate it. Right now, I just try my luck with google when visiting a new city.

Google-maps directions—set to cycling—gives gradient info. I don't use that feature regularly—and not for accessibility planning|assessment—but if you haven't checked it out, it may be worth a look.

A topo map gives you more information than you need, while a key point of an effective visualization is to distill the information down to just what the audience needs to know to get their questions answered. In particular with modern reading habits of skimming and quick glances when engaging with digital content, the simpler solution is (as usual) better.

Topographical maps present the height and leave the gradient to be interpreted by the reader, if it's possible at all. What this shows is the gradient and is much more useful to me as a cyclist and/or pedestrian, I don't care if I'm ascending 50m but I do care if that's over a 100 meter or 200 meter distance. Depending on how fine grained a topographical map is this information could be hard to impossible to interpret.

A topo map would be too busy. Also, the steepness of roads and the surrounding land can be different, so a topo map could also be less informative at first glance.

In the special case of Edinburgh, Ordnance Survey maps are quite misleading about some streets as there are quite a few streets that are actually bridges built between hills - the map gives the topography of the underlying ground not the street - so some streets look steep on the map but are actually built to be level.

I like top maps, but they are less useful in cities. Compare:

http://www.tobyeglesfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/DRC...

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/-45.0344/168.6630&laye...

Topo maps miss bridges too.

I would hazard a guess that the average person doesn't really know what a topo map is and wouldn't know how to read one if they had it open in front of them.

Schools in my country are well above average then...

Yeah I feel like this is re-inventing the wheel - as a topographic map is a solved problem from (100?) years ago. Regarding the learning curve - it takes a maximum of 15 minutes to understand how to read them. After you 'get it' you can visualize the flat map in 3d.

The one issue of using topo maps for city navigation is that the contour lines are sometimes hard to make out when having buildings, streets and other noise in the foreground (I'm using OsmAnd contours as an example).

The blog post itself is really nice of how it goes in-depth. The final product reminds me of those ski-resort maps that show the downhills. The final product works really well as a tourist informational map.

If you're new in town and want to go to location X, what is better? Glancing at the map and immediately grasping that the street is up a hill, or looking at a probably unfamiliar topographical map and possibly spending 5 to 15 minutes learning how to read it? I'd kill for a map like this for any hilly town I'd visit, and I know how to read topographical maps