Crash statistics differences from 2011 to 2012
I posted this as a series of tweets on Friday night.
Category: Data
Stop locking your bike at the Clybourn Metra station overnight
This is a resolution.
WHEREAS, I love GIS.
WHEREAS, I was reading this blog post on the Azavea company blog about bike theft prediction and trends in Philadelphia.
WHEREAS, I analyzed bike theft location in Chicago in 2012 and the Clybourn Metra station emerged as the most frequent Metra theft location.
WHEREAS, I searched the Chicago Stolen Bike Registry for “clybourn” and several thefts have been reported to the registry in 2013.
WHEREAS, I believe the Chicago Police Department still doesn’t allow searching of their database for bike thefts thus leaving the CSBR as the premier source of data.
WHEREAS, I am watching this show called The Bletchley Circle wherein a group of four fictional women who cracked codes in World War II are solving a murder mystery in 1950s London.
BE IT RESOLVED that you should not leave your bicycle parked at the Clybourn Metra station overnight as it is a terrible place to leave a bicycle parked. Why? No one is around most of the time to socially secure your bicycle.
This is a great place to get your bike stolen. In the dark. Overnight. With no one around to see it happen.
How many cars are in Rogers Park?
There are a gazillion cars in Rogers Park, and there’s no place to park them. That’s the declaration you would gather if you listen to “Lakefront Car Tower” (a parking garage) proponents, including the 49th ward alderman, Joe Moore.
The parking problem is so bad in Rogers Park that a parking garage at Sherwin Avenue and Sheridan Road that would provide less than 100 overnight parking spaces to the public was actually sent from Asphaltia, the god of car parks. It’s so bad that “[m]any car owners find themselves stuck in their home at night” – yes, the alderman really published that on his website – because they find a parking space on Friday night and can’t move the car until Monday morning. The horror of using your feet, pedals, the bus, the train, car sharing, paratransit, or a Segway!
(I’d love to get into parking pricing policy now, but I’ll just leave you with this: of course there is going to be a demand problem when the supply of publicly-owned on-street parking costs $0 per year.)
This post is actually a tutorial on how to use United States Census data to find how many cars are in the neighborhood of Rogers Park, not a laugh about Asphaltia’s teachings.
Let’s begin! Continue reading
On Active Transportation Alliance’s transportation summit
Active Transportation Alliance invited Eric Hanns and I to speak about “using data for advocacy” at their first annual transportation summit held after a member meeting two Saturdays ago. My and Eric’s talks were complementary and centered around the data tool I built and which Eric and the other volunteers in the 46th Ward participatory budgeting program used to prioritize and market infrastructure projects in Uptown.
The tool in question is the Chicago Crash Browser I made last year and improved this year to load data faster, with great help from the Smart Chicago Collaborative and several members of the OpenGov Hack Night group I cherish.
Click or tap a spot in Chicago to retrieve the number of bicyclist-car and pedestrian-car crashes within 150 feet. With this information, the PB volunteers could show the alderman how important it was for him to support bike and pedestrian infrastructure projects in the ward, and to persuade ward voters to fund these projects.
Find more information about the four other summit “breakout groups” on Active Trans’s website. Eric and I prepared a “Using Data for Advocacy: Making the Case with Compelling Facts” handout which you can download as a PDF or see on our Google Doc. I’ve conveniently listed the links from the handout below but if you want more pointed advice on where to look for specific data, or get an answer to questions you have but don’t grok the context of each of these tools, leave me a comment.
- BikeIndex and Chicago Stolen Bike Registry (bike registration)
- Close Calls, report your hairy situations
- Chicago Health Atlas (neighborhood demographics/health)
- NYT Census Browser, American FactFinder for decennial and annual census information which you may find difficult to use if you’re uninitiated to the site or data
- Second City Zoning, Vacant Building Finder by Open City Apps
- Service Tracker, Chicago Works (Open311 app)
- Capital projects (sewer work, repaving, etc.): your alderman’s office, website, and newsletter (Alderman Reilly has the most informative newsletters on Loop activity); the hard-to-navigate city website (here are 2013 water and sewer main projects)
- Other information: FOIA (Freedom of Information Act; this is a somewhat arduous process but it’s almost guaranteed to get you the information you need if simply asking doesn’t work)
- Chicago Department of Transportation plans: Streets for Cycling Plan 2020, Bike 2015 Plan, Complete Streets Design Guidelines, Sustainable Infrastructure Design Guidelines (see also: NACTO urban bikeway design guide, Active Trans’s Complete Streets, Complete Networks)
- Open-source mapping platforms: Google Fusion Tables, OpenStreetMap, GeoCommons, Scribble Maps
- Chicago Open Data Portal
- IDOT Traffic Counts
- CMAP Data (Demographics, Land Use, other)
How to convert bike-share JSON data to CSV and then to shapefile
Update January 4, 2013: The easiest way to do this is to use Ian Dees’s Divvy API as it outputs straight to GeoJSON (which QGIS likes). See below.
For Michael Carney’s Divvy bike-share stations + Census tract + unbanked Chicagoans analysis and map he needed the Divvy station locations as a shapefile. I copied the JSON-formatted text of the Divvy real-time station API, converted it to CSV with OpenRefine, and then created a shapefile with QGIS.
Here’s how to create a shapefile of any bike-share system that uses hardware from Public Bike System Co based on Montréal and is operated by Alta Bicycle Share (this includes New York City, Chattanooga, Bay Area, Melbourne, and Chicago): Continue reading