Let’s take a walk down Change Street

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already interested in planning and neighborhood issues. You already know that your DOT installs bike racks and the Parks Dept takes care of street trees. Streetswiki is already in your bookmarks, right next to your watch list of local meetings courtesy of Meeting Matters. But not everyone  has your grip on the complexity of creating local change.

Change Street showing a bike rackEnter Change St, a super-simple cartoon streetscape. Scroll down, and your cheerful digital avatar takes a walk, past street trees, bike racks, a speed bump, and a block party. For each one, hover your cursor to see a few useful links about each improvement, including where to get started. With this project, we’re experimenting with unconventional ways to display useful info.

change.st is also a development experiment – we’re taking advantage of modern browsers’ recent adoption of Scalable Vector Graphics to render highly interactive scenes.  Fast Javascript engines make it possible to project from 3-dimensional space to the screen in the browser on the fly. We’re creating and positioning scene elements on the fly – as you scroll down the page, each item in the scene gets repositioned in 3D space relative to the world around it, and projected into 2D.  We then use jQuery to place the items where they should be on screen.

Continue reading

Exploring Denver’s Beautiful Streets

Beautiful Streets is launching in Denver, hosted by Place Matters:

Over the next couple of months we will be asking the city to answer the basic question: which street is more beautiful?  We hope to generate a large database of crowdsourced data on preferences for streets throughout the city.  The choices have been randomly generated across the city.  This dataset will then be available for coders and designers at our summer hackathon to visualize and interpret using other available datasets in the region.  We are very excited about this because it will help us test an interface that could be used in the future on specific planning and civic engagement processes here in the region and across the country.

We’re excited too. We launched Beautiful Streets for Philly back in February. As I write this, 102,982 pairs have been evaluated, producing a fascinating dataset. For Denver, you can optionally tell the app where you’re based, which gives an even richer picture of how preferences might vary between different places. Or not – let’s find out!.

Prepping the project for Denver has given us a chance to write some documentation and tidy up the configuration process. Check out the project on github. Maybe there are some Beautiful Streets near you?

 

 

Open & Candid: Aaron Sutula

Aaron Sutula has previously worked at the National Weather Service, working on an agency-first project to deliver weather info directly to consumer’s mobile devices. At OpenPlans he’ll be working to make Bus Time faster, more responsive and just plain better.  Aaron sat down to talk about where he’s been, what he’s been doing and where he plans to take us.

How have you liked OpenPlans so far?
It’s been great. It’s nice to work in an environment where there are a bunch of self-motivated people working on cool things. It feels like everyone is here because they want to be. It’s inspiring.

What projects were your working on prior to OpenPlans?
Before OpenPlans, I was working with the National Weather Service doing weather-related research and development.  My background is in meteorology, but the longer I worked there, the more I got into software, data, and design.  For a few years, I was working on software that the NWS uses to verify and improve their weather forecasts and numeric models. After that, I got more into the data and dissemination side of things. My main project was called iNWS.  It was a system that allowed people to register and receive customized weather alerts via SMS, email and web based geographic location.

Was this one of the NWS’s first forays into communicating directly with people versus communicating with larger disseminators like news outlets and such?
It was. It was a challenge is a few technical ways, but mostly a huge political and cultural challenge. It was a fun project for all those reasons. Continue reading

Urban Rooftop Balloon Mapping with Public Laboratory

Click through for a full album of rooftop balloon mapping pics

We went up and above and made use of our building’s untapped air rights with a Public Laboratory Balloon Mapping Kit.  Liz Barry, Leif Percifield, and Jason Eppnik of Public Lab along with our friends at Vizzuality set up shop on our deck and together we assembled and launched the helium balloon and camera rig.  We got it as high as 100′ up from our roof.   The rig snapped some great aerial pics of of our roof deck and the immediate surroundings of Chinatown and Soho.  Check out the pics, straight from the balloon.

Balloon mapping allows anyone to get aerial photos up to 500′ above the ground.  The Public Laboratory is your de facto source for info on the tools, the regulations and best practices for you to do your own balloon mapping.  Sign up on Public Laboratory to follow their progress: http://publiclaboratory.org/user/register

From view from Howard and Centre St

1 Gelb Luftballon

 

Streetfilms & Streetsblog Happy Hour

 

You’re all invited to the Streetsblog & Streetfilms Happy Hour!

Join the Streetsblog and Streetfilms team at Red Lantern, Brooklyn’s premiere cafe bike shop, for an evening of fun and films. Celebrate the growing livable streets movement and meet the stars of the My NYC Biking Story Streetfilms. Drink specials courtesy of Red Lantern.

Wednesday, May 9th 8:00-10:00PM Red Lantern

Red Lantern 345 Myrtle Ave. (between Adelphi & Carlton)
Fort Greene, Brooklyn, NY $5-$10 suggested donation 21+ Please RSVP here.

See you there!