Category: Transportation

Data collection issues in police database design

February 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Please don’t park on sucker (er, sign) poles. And use a good lock. When your bike is stolen, no one but you will care. And the police won’t even know. 

When I asked the Chicago Police Department for statistics on how many bicycles are reported stolen each year, the response was that statistics couldn’t be provided because the database can’t be filtered on “bicycle theft”. I called the police officer responding to my FOIA request to learn more. He said that bike thefts are only categorized as “property thefts under $300” or “property thefts over $300”.

It would be possible to search through the database using keywords, but that would have been an unreasonable use of the officer’s and department’s time in accordance with FOIA laws (FOIA meaning Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIL in other states).

What a poorly designed database.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has Uniform Crime Reporting standards that police departments nationwide voluntarily adopt. It’s mainly a way for the FBI to collect statistics across the country and I assume this program is necessary because of a state’s right to impose its own standards. That sounds fine by me, but it shouldn’t impede collecting data to assist the Department of Transportation, and the Police Department itself, to combat bike theft. The Bike 2015 Plan, released in 2005 and adopted by the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Council (MBAC), includes several strategies to reduce bike theft in Chicago.

The FBI has a standard reporting code for bike thefts: 6Xf. Its definition is “the unlawful taking of any bicycle, tandem bicycle, unicycle, etc.”

The Chicago Police Department should upgrade its database to code property theft of bicycles as a “bike theft”. For now, though, advocates and activists will have to rely on the homegrown Chicago Stolen Bike Registry*. If you don’t know the extent of the problem, it’ll be hard to develop any solution.

The Bike 2015 Plan called for a report, by 2006, to be written that determined the “amount and types of bike theft”. We’re in 2012 – where’s that report?

Thinking about New York City

New York City’s Police Department (NYPD) has similar, but more grievous, database problems. Right now the New York City Council is holding a hearing to figure out why the NYPD isn’t investigating reckless drivers who’ve killed people walking and cycling. And I read this about it:

 Vacca’s first question to Deputy Chief John Cassidy, the NYPD Chief of Transportation, was about speeding, and how often drivers caught speeding are charged with reckless endangerment. The answer came not from Cassidy, but from Susan Petito, an NYPD attorney, who politely explained that they simply don’t know, because reckless endangerment charges “are not segregated in the database” and can’t be easily found. Via Gothamist.

Hmm, seems like the same issue the Chicago Police Department has.

* The Stolen Bike Registry has its own issues, which is often because of “user error”, wherein people who submit reports to it don’t provide much detail, especially as from where the bike was stolen.

New map tutorials

February 14, 2012 / / 0 Comments

A screenshot of using BatchGeocode to take a spreadsheet of addresses and turn it into a nice map. 

Over at Grid Chicago, my other blog that sucks all the time from this blog, I’ve recently written tutorials on how to create online maps, first with Google My Maps (which they renamed to My places) and secondly with BatchGeocode (which renamed itself to BatchGeo because it does more than geocoding now).

Google My Maps is primitive as far as map making goes, but it has the lowest learning curve and it’s easy: you just click on the map where you want something to go and fill in the info window. Read that tutorial.

BatchGeocode is slightly more advanced, but takes your tabular data (most likely from a spreadsheet) and throws it on a map you can embed on your website. They do have pay features. Read the tutorial for BatchGeocode.

I’ve written about BatchGeocode for QGIS, as it was once the only way to do geocoding in QGIS. But now BatchGeocode doesn’t give you a results table that has the latitude and longitude (apparently this is against Google Maps’s terms of service). But I updated the article to talk about using other methods for geocoding in QGIS.

I will be writing two more tutorials, one about GeoCommons and one about Google Fusion Tables.

A before shot of Chicago’s first bike boulevard, and facility semantics

February 5, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It looks like nothing now. It’s just a street with mixed one-way and two-way segments. The bike boulevard’s best idea is making it two-way for bicycling. One-way streets are annoying, especially to people new to the neighborhood (like when visiting friends). The route is Berteau Avenue, the site of the first bike boulevard, from Lincoln Avenue on the west to Clark Street on the east (dead ending at Graceland Cemetery).

Article updated February 6, 2012, 11:30, to add photo of Portland bioswale. 

The eastern “entrance” to the bike boulevard.

CDOT is calling it instead a “neighborhood greenway”. I don’t know what’s so “greenway” about it, even after John’s interview with Mike Amsden of CDOT for Grid Chicago. Portland and Seattle have very specific stormwater management features built into their neighborhood greenways, so the names make more sense there. Chicago has a stormwater mismanagement feature: Deep Tunnel (or TARP; see more articles I wrote), where we are trying to build ourselves out of flooding. But it’s not possible. During every major rain storm we have to open the sewers and dump untreated stormwater and sewage into Lake Michigan. Many beaches close the next day.

A bioswale in Portland, at the corner of SE Clay Street and SE 12th Avenue, collects water runoff from the street and sidewalks. The plants in the bioswale absorb the water they can; other water is cleaned and absorbed into the soil where it slowly enters the earth. The earth is probably the only underground reservoir we need. 

I understand the idea behind removing “bike” from the facility’s name, as the project is about traffic calming and making it safer and smoother for all transportation modes to maneuver on this street. That’s fine, but I’m hoping for bioswales and other features to be included in this facility.

Needs some new asphalt. 

This photo reminds me to ask CDOT if a repaving is part of the project. I presume it will be because it’s very dumb to install new pavement markings on bad pavement (but it happened at least once last year, on Armitage Avenue east of Western Avenue).

Courtenay School

I agree with the notion that streets with schools receive a higher priority than streets without, but I don’t think they should be weighted higher than streets with high bicycling volume or crashes (I don’t know exactly if there’s such a detailed weighting system in the bikeway planning section of the Chicago Bicycle Program).

Brown Line passes an office building

There’s at least one building with active businesses on the route. This one has the EveryBlock headquarters inside.

Regional rail trains pass here

Metra is rebuilding tens of viaducts on the Union Pacific North line, including this one over Berteau. Not all the streets have underpasses so Berteau was a natural choice as an east-west route in the neighborhood because of this barrier.

I took all of these photos with a Panasonic GH1, and accompanying lens, a LUMIX G 20/f1.7mm.

More discussion on this is in the comments below, on The Chainlink, on Grid Chicago, and on EveryBlock. 

The fixie-hipster index for this bike rack is near 1

January 23, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Upon leaving the Third Thursdays party at the Chrome store at 1529 N Milwaukee in Wicker Park I spotted a bike with a funny attachment on the stem. After uploading the photo, I inspected it more closely and saw that four fixed gear bikes were locked to a single bike rack.

The fixie-hipster index for this bike rack (for this block, even) is nearing 1! Or 100%. Or 1:1.

But Chicago didn’t even place in the Top 25 Hipster Places in America.