Vertical short
Five bridges
A vertical short of the New York City Marathon course.
Short
Five bridges
Five bridges
Aerial imagery: Google Earth, and the imagery providers credited on screen in the film.
The five crossings and where each one actually lands, ending on the Bronx as what it is on this course: a two-and-a-half kilometre loop between two bridges, holding seven of the forty corners.
Rendered from
The open data this film is built from.
4 of 4layers verified usable. Every layer below may enter a render.
| Layer | Role | Resolution | Licence | Commercial use | Verified |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NYC 3-D Building Model (CityGML, LoD1.5/LoD2 hybrid)City of New York, Office of Technology and Innovation - NYC Open Data · City | Buildings | LoD1.5 prismatic with roof-structure detail; roughly 100 iconic buildings modelled to LoD2 | NYC Open Data - Terms of Use (no named licence)Weaker than Berlin's position, and the difference is worth stating plainly.Berlin ships under a named, machine-readable licence (dl-de/zero-2-0). New York publishes no named licence at all: the dataset metadata says only 'Open Data policies and restrictions apply', nyc.gov's general Terms of Use reserve rights over site materials without addressing datasets, and the clearest grant anywhere in the chain is the Open Data FAQ - 'Open Data belongs to all New Yorkers. There are no restrictions on the use of Open Data.' That sentence is the basis for commercialUse here, and it is a policy statement rather than a licence grant. Second constraint, unrelated to licensing: the survey is 2014 and described as a one-time capture, so a decade of Long Island City and Hudson Yards towers is missing. | Cleared | |
| NYC orthoimagery, 2024 flightCity of New York / New York State GIS Program Office · City | Imagery | 6 in/px (about 15 cm), 4-band, true ortho | NYC Open Data - Terms of Use (no named licence)Same unnamed-licence position as the building model.Resolution is better than Berlin's DOP20: 15 cm against 20 cm, which raises rather than lowers the ceiling on low passes. Vintage still has to be picked by season before it is picked by resolution - the Berlin lesson was that leaf-on is the decision and sharpness is the detail. New York flies biennially, so 2024, 2022 and 2020 are all available to compare. | Cleared | |
| USGS 3DEP 1 m digital elevation model (bare earth)United States Geological Survey, 3D Elevation Program · National | Terrain | 1 m, bare earth (DTM) | Public domain (work of the United States Government)The one layer in the New York stack whose licence needs no conversation with anybody.It is also a bare-earth DTM, which is the whole point: our standing rule on elevation is that an urban surface model contains the buildings and reads them as hills, and Berlin only escaped that by finding an open ATKIS DGM1. 3DEP is the American equivalent and it is national, so this solves the terrain layer for every United States race, not only this one. SAMPLED 2026-09-11 along the full course: 857 points, none missing, 851 of them answered from 1 m data captured 2014-03-01. Six fell back to the seamless 1/3 arc-second DEM (about 10 m) in three short runs between km 32.2 and km 32.8 in the Bronx, and which raster answers near a coverage boundary is not deterministic - re-running moves the course gain by up to 0.2 m on 105 m. Both facts are recorded per run alongside the profile itself. The service reports cell size in the source raster's own units, so the test is 'is it 1', never 'is it small'. Bare earth is also its limit: over a bridge it returns the ground or the hydro-flattened water surface beneath, and 14.7 % of this course is on a deck - it reads -1.62 m across The Narrows while the Verrazzano deck is sixty metres up. Those runs are interpolated in this layer, and drawn dashed. They no longer carry no gradient claim: as of 2026-09-12 the decks are measured from 3DEP's point cloud, which still contains the deck the DEM removes - bare earth is a product, not the survey. See the 3DEP point cloud entry below, and the NOAA topobathy lidar entry for the Queensboro, which is occluded by its own upper roadway and is the one bridge 3DEP cannot see. A gradient claim must cite those, never this. | Cleared | |
| OpenStreetMapOpenStreetMap contributors / OpenStreetMap Foundation · Global | Vectors | vector, street level | Open Database License 1.0 (ODbL)Attribution requiredShare-alike“(c) OpenStreetMap contributors”Explicitly commercial-friendly, which is why the shipped course line is OSM geometry rather than the organiser's GPX. Share-alike binds a derived database, not a rendered frame. Overpass returns HTTP 406 unless a User-Agent header is set. | Cleared |