Category: Information

Why did women in Chicago stop bicycling to work? And other stories about data

February 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Why did women in Chicago stop bicycling to work?
Or is our data unreliable?

Showing relative cycling-to-work rates between 2005 and 2009 in Chicago. Data from table S0801 in American Community Survey, 1-year estimates. Read the comments on this post for why this is not the best data source – 3-year estimate shows same decline in women cycling to work.

Note: The sample size is puny – data was collected from 80,613 housing units in Illinois. I don’t know how many of those were in Chicago (and we have 1,063,047 housing units). The American Community Survey only collects data on transportation modes to work for ages 16 and up.

But we simply have no other data! Maybe the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning can release the Chicago data they collected for the 2008 household travel survey to show us bicycling rates for all trip purposes (they divided the report into counties). The sample size would still be small, but we could compare the work rates to find some support between the datasets.

We should look into how New York City counts bicycling as an additional way to gauge trends in Chicago (it has limitations of geography and area).

They conduct two types of counts. The first is the screenline count for bridges, Staten Island Ferry, the Hudson River Greenway, and all Avenues at 50th Street. They do this three times per year. Then, seven more times a year, they count at the same places (except the Avenues) from April to October.

While this data does not give them information on who cycles in the boroughs, it does give them a good indicator of cycling levels in Manhattan. It also disregards trip purpose, counting everyone going to work, school, or for social activities.

Sidenote: The New York Police Department will begin making monthly statistical reports on bicycle crashes in the city.

Interview with Bay Citizen on bike crash map

February 16, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Thank you, Tasmeen, for asking about my bike crash map that your newspaper inspired me to create.

Read the interview.

Read about the bike crash map for Chicago.

View the bike crash map for Chicago (2007-2009).

It’s not this sunny yet, but today it was 49°F in Chicago. This photo was taken on Milwaukee Avenue, where the most people bike, and where the most people have bike crashes.

Converting Google My Maps to KML and GPX

February 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Convert your routes that you made in Google My Maps to GPX so that you can view them on Garmin GPS devices, or upload them to MapMyRide.

  1. Access your My Map. Your My Map must have lines or routes in it. It appears that a My Map with only points doesn’t convert correctly.
  2. Click on View in Google Earth. Your web browser will download a KML file. It may automatically open in Google Earth, but this is not necessary.
  3. Visit GPS Visualizer to convert your KML file to GPX
  4. Select GPX as your output.
  5. For the input, choose the KML file you just downloaded from Google My Maps.
  6. Click Convert. Your file will be uploaded and your GPX file will be presented for download on the next page.
  7. Download your GPX file from the link on the page.

You can now transfer the GPX file to your GPS device, or upload it to MapMyRide. I confirmed that MapMyRide successfully imports the Google My Map I converted following these instructions.

The faces of Midwest urban innovation

February 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

From the UPPSA-sponsored Urban Innovation Symposium at University of Illinois at Chicago on Friday, February 4, 2011. See all 22 photos.

Informatics in health care

Dr. Annette L. Valenta
Professor
Biomedical and Health Information Sciences, UIC

Deconstruction and reusing building materials to reduce waste

Elise Zelechowski
Deputy Executive Director
Delta Institute

Let nature handle our waste water systems instead of circumventing it

James Patchett
President and Founder
Conservation Design Forum

Community-driven planning – sometimes you can excuse the City’s input

Marcia Canton Campbell
Director of Center for Resilient Cities in Milwaukee

Break out of the organization chart, let innovation rise from anywhere

Aaron Renn
Urban issues blogger

Trying out uDig, a free, multi-platform GIS application

February 10, 2011 / / 0 Comments

ArcGIS is the standard in geographic information system applications. I don’t like that it’s expensive, unwieldy to install and update, and its user interface is stymying and slow*. I also use Mac OS X most of the time and ArcGIS is not available for Mac. It doesn’t have to be the standard.

I’ve tried my hand at Cartographica and QGIS. I really like QGIS because there’re many plugins, it’s open source, there’s a diverse community supporting it, and best of all, it’s free. I’ve written about Cartographica once – I’m not a fan right now.

My project

  • The data: Bicycle crashes in the City of Chicago as reported to IDOT for 2007-2009
  • Goal: Publish an interactive map of this data using Google Fusion Tables and its instant mapping feature.
  • Visualizing it: Added streets (prepared beforehand to exclude highways), water features, and city boundary (get that here)
  • Process: Combine bike crash data; reproject to WGS84 for Google; remove extraneous information; add latitude/longitude coordinates; export as CSV; upload to Google Fusion Tables; map it!
  • View the final product

Trying out uDig

In reaching my goal I had a task that I couldn’t figure out how to complete with QGIS: I needed to combine three shapefiles with identical table schemes into one shapefile – this one shapefile would eventually be published as one map. The join feature in fTools wasn’t working so I looked for a new solution, uDig, or “User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS.”

The solution was very easy. Highlight all the records in the attribute table of one shapefile, click Edit>Copy, then select the destination table and click Edit>Paste. The new records were added within a couple seconds. I could then bring this data back into QGIS to finish the process (outlined above under Project). I did use fTools later in the process to add lat/long coordinates to my single shapefile.

After adding more data to better visualize the crashes in Chicago, I noticed that uDig renders maps to look smoother and slightly prettier than QGIS or ArcGIS. See the screenshot below.

A screenshot of the three bicycle crash datasets (2007, 2008, 2009) with the visualization data added.

The end product: three years of police reported bicycle crashes in the City of Chicago on an interactive map powered by Google Fusion Tables, another product in Google’s arsenal of GIS for the poor man. View the final product.

*I haven’t used ArcGIS version 10 yet, which I see and read has an improved user interface; it’s unclear to me and other users if the program’s been updated to take advantage of multi-core processors. ESRI has a roundabout way of describing their support.