Comments on: What Transportation Data Should NYC Open Up?

By: glenn

glenn — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:53:42 +0000

Gothamist has some type of feed of all the incidents reported with location in real-time. Something like that with a tracker #ID so you can follow-up on incidents to see what happened. Link in MVAs, 311, 911, emergency response.

Real-time traffic counts would be really cool. Then we could see the impact of different interventions ourselves instead of waiting for “traffic engineers” to sanitize it and make it unreadable.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:49:38 +0000

Ian,

Actually, they do! (see above). And they have done so for years. In fact, I’m pretty sure their database contains versioning info — they can see prior parking regulations.

By: Ian Turner

Ian Turner — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:03:22 +0000

Angus,

A lot of this data is not in digital form or indeed not maintained at all — for example, the city does not actually maintain records of its parking regulaions.

By: lee

lee — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 17:42:36 +0000

You can now search for parking regulations on any street in the city.

http://a841-dotvweb01.nyc.gov/ParkingRegs/ViewController/LocationValidation.aspx

By: Nick Grossman

Nick Grossman — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:42:22 +0000

@Angus, great stuff. I could imagine a whole slew of tools that could be produced on top of these datasets — DIY street design simulations, “the people’s” traffic modeling, calculating economic impacts of policy changes (I’m thinking parking), etc etc. Imagine the visualizations!

By: Angus Grieve-Smith

Angus Grieve-Smith — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 23:39:17 +0000

The DOT has tons of data that could be very helpful to livable streets advocates – data on street width, lane width, sidewalk width, number of lanes, bike facilities, location of crosswalks, etc. There’s signal data: length of green, yellow, red, walk and don’t walk for each direction. And policy data: parking restrictions, no-parking zones, placard zones, “self-enforcement zones,” etc.

Even more useful to the public would be the data they collect on street usage: counts of cars, pedestrians, cyclists sampled at various points. Speed data too.

Say you’re wondering if your signals weren’t retimed recently to speed traffic, or you’re hoping to get a four-way stop sign or a raised crosswalk. This data would be very helpful. I found something like this on the “Big Apps Ideas” site and voted it up: Traffic data of all kinds – speed, volume etc. You might want to do the same.

I can only think of two reasons not to open that data up to the public: (1) it would take a lot of time, money and effort away from other projects, and (2) it would give more information to the public.