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You may have heard me on the radio this morning in Chicago

April 21, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Here’s the audio clip of my interview with WGN 720 AM producer Rob Hart about biking in Chicago and the bike crash map I made. It aired this morning – I had no idea until someone left me a comment on a Flickr photo that they heard me.

Listen now: Steven Vance on biking and bike crashes in Chicago on WGN.mp3 (will play in your browser).

I am too nervous to listen to this. I’m sure I said something wrong or misspoke.

Biking in Chicago is fun and you should do it. You don’t need special gear or equipment and you can buy a cheap bike at Working Bikes in Pilsen, at 2434 S Western Avenue.

Transcript

[ding, ding]

A little bell may be what comes to mind when you think of riding your bike, but the reality is more like this.

[sounds of traffic]

A busy street full of cars, trucks, and buses. With drivers who are looking at something else.

Me: There’s a lot of driveways. A lot of drivers are making right and left turns and if you ride too close to the curb they will probably not see you, so you have to ride sometimes outside the bike lane if you want to be noticed.

Steven Vance ditched his car 5 years ago. He rides his bike all over the city and he says sometimes it’s a white knuckled experience.

Me: It can be. It does take a little bit of resolve. Sometimes your nerves will get frayed, but I think the benefit outweighs the cost.

After a newspaper [Bay Citizen] in San Francisco mapped out bike crashes on its website, Vance decided to plot bike crashes in the Chicago area on his.

Me: I saw that, and I thought, “You know what, I think I can do that.” I asked the Illinois Department of Transportation for the data and they promptly sent it over and I, as quickly as possible, put it online.

The diagonal streets are the worst, he found, and that includes Milwaukee Avenue.

Me: You could find Milwaukee just by the number of dots representing the crashes. You didn’t need a label to say that this was Milwaukee Avenue. You could tell simply by the string, the constant string of dots.

 

My essential QGIS plugins

April 18, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Plugins for QGIS I use most often.

All of these can be installed automatically by QGIS. Click on Plugins>Fetch Python Plugins. Then search for the plugin, click on its name, and click Install Plugin. Few plugins require a restart.

  • MMQGIS – Great for working with CSV files; also merges layers (even if they have differing attributes); has various other useful functions, including converting string data to float data. Has Voronoi diagram function (takes a long time to process).
  • fTools – Replicates some of the most basic geographic tools in ArcGIS, like Clip, Dissolve, and Reproject. Can also add X/Y values to point attribute tables that are missing them (if you want latitude/longitude, you must reproject into a coordinate reference system first, like WGS84 [EPSG: 4326]). Unfortunately, there’s little information on what each fTools function does. Below are descriptions:
    • Extract Nodes – Create a point at each intersection of vertices.
    • Basic Statistics – Generate arithmetic statistics for fields, same as statistics function in ArcGIS. Great for quickly understanding the extent of values in a field (especially numeric values), like mean, max, min, standard deviation, and number of unique values.
    • Nearest Neighbour Analysis – More details here.
    • Geoprocessing Tools>Dissolve – Combine features based on a shared attribute. For example, all features with an identical STREET_TYPE be combined into a single feature. For example, all “Avenues” will become one feature and all “Boulevards” will become a second feature. Only works on polygon layers.
    • Descrição em português
  • Table Manager
  • Open Layers – Embed Google, Yahoo, Bing, and OpenStreetMap layers in your map. See my example.

Bike businesses that keep me pedaling: UV Metal Arts (1 of 4)

April 14, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Four part series of Midwest bike-related businesses that keep me and my bike rolling without hassle.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Well, my rear rack was broken and I wanted someone to fix it. I didn’t want to buy a new rack if it could be fixed – I don’t want to send raw materials to the landfill. I contacted Owen Lloyd for help with welding a piece of my Planet Bike Eco Rack back together. The “deck” had detached from the last rail and was flapping around making noise but also reduced the strength of the rack structure. Thinking about it now, I could probably have asked Planet Bike for a replacement as they have a lifetime warranty on all of their products. But I wanted it fixed here and now.

Owen brought me over to Yuval “UV” Awazu of UV Metal Arts in Bubbly Dynamics at 1048 West 37th Street and his UV Metal Arts workshop in Bridgeport. The rack is made of aluminum and UV was the only craftsperson in the “factory” who can weld it. He can do way more than repairing small parts like these. He also powdercoats bike frames and “bakes” them in a tall, custom oven he built himself.

10 minutes later, I had a rack that was stronger than brand new!

My repaired rack. I highly recommend this rack as it only costs $21 on Amazon, but if you expect it to last longer than two years and carry weight on it daily (and maybe sometimes too much or lopsided), then get something stronger.

UV at the Bike Winter Cycle Swap in February. See more photos from this event.

A bicycle that UV colored. UV says you can choose just about any color (including metallics) for your item (powder coating is for more than just bicycles).

More in this series

  1. UV Metal Arts – You’re reading it!
  2. Lloyd Cycles – coming soon
  3. Kozie Prery – coming soon, and with a contest!
  4. Planet Bike – coming soon

Two new beta apps for Chicago geography

April 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

I think 2011 is going to be the year of apps for me. I developed one for bikes and one for politics.

Bikes

I made the “Chicago Bike Data Portal” app on Saturday night. It gets your location via the HTML5 geolocation API and loads a list and map of all the reported bike crashes within half a mile. It works on some mobile phones, too (at least Android and iOS). Expect to see more data in the future, like ped and automobile crashes.

Politics

Then on Monday I made an app called, “Who is my Chicago Alderman?” where people can type in their address (or any address) and retrieve the alderman’s name, addresses, and phone numbers. I’ve already identified a problem where the app returns the wrong information for an address. I think this is a problem with the geocoder. Ever since CivicFootprint (a project of Center for Neighborhood Technology) disappeared, the city’s been missing an easy-to-use app for finding alderman. The city clerk’s website takes too long to use and is not as informative.

Other apps I built or worked on