Category: Data

Swiss transit journey planners can guide you to the top of any mountain

January 24, 2016 / / 0 Comments

Steven’s note: I originally wrote this in January 2017 for Transitland, my contract employer at the time. Links may be broken.

Looking west from Mount Rigi-Kulm and you can see the cloud layer that prevents you from seeing Lake Lucerne. The two cog railways are parked in the middle.

Looking west from Mount Rigi-Kulm and you can see the cloud layer that prevents you from seeing Lake Lucerne. The two cog railways are parked in the middle.

A month ago I hopped over to Germany to start a holiday trip over Christmas and the New Year. I flew into Frankfurt but I would be returning to Chicago from Zurich, Switzerland, almost three weeks later. I had spent two hours in Zurich in 2016 on a layover, and I was struck by the city’s beauty and their amazing public transport system. I made it a priority to revisit Zurich, to have a proper stay.

Before I left, I was already working to import the single GTFS transit feed for the whole country into Transitland, so I was aware of some of the transit systems. That work continues because the feed is massive; it has more than 400 operators and I need to add metadata about each of them.

I arrived the night before my mountain trip to a hotel – a 3 minute walk to the nearest entrance to Zurich’s hauptbahnhof (main station) – and I spent that whole evening planning an epic transit and mountain adventure the next day. (I stayed in because it’s also pretty expensive to go out in Zurich, so I was also saving my money for what turned out to be an _expensive _ epic trip.)

When in Switzerland, I figured, you should spend time outside on a mountain. And there’s no exception in the winter.

a view of Lake Lucerne from inside the cog railway train that's going up the mountain

It’s a cog railway up a Swiss mountain, of course it’s going to look steep like this.

I googled “nearest mountain to Zurich” and found Mount Rigi. I never validated if Mount Rigi is the nearest mountain, but after reviewing details on how to get to the base and how to get to the top (the mountain has its own website), I could tell it would be possible to go there and return in the same day.

Mount Rigi has multiple peaks, the tallest of which is Rigi Kulm at 1,798 meters, and you can plan a trip directly there with a single app.

You can use the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) smartphone app or website to plan a trip from anywhere in Switzerland to the cog railway station below the restaurant atop Rigi Kulm. Seriously.

I wanted to use as many modes as possible, and I don’t like going on the same route more than once, so I adjusted SBB’s recommended route to travel from Zurich to Rigi Kulm via Lucerne and Vitznau. This was my outgoing itinerary:

  • Depart Zurich HB at 10:04 on InterRegio 2637 to Lucerne, arriving at 10:49
  • Depart Luzern Bahnhofquai (train station dock) on a boat across Lake Lucerne at 11:12 to Vitznau at the base of the mountain, arriving at 12:09
  • Depart Vitznau on Rigi-Bahnen 1127 at 12:15, arriving to the peak at 12:47

After spending about five hours on the mountain – I took a small cable car to a second peak – I heaaded down the mountain on a different cog railway to Arth-Goldau, a valley town with InterCity train service direct to Zurich.

screenshot of the SBB journey planner showing the trip from Zurich to the top of Mount Rigi-Kulm, changing from an intercity train to a boat to a cog railway.

The SBB website shows my actual itinerary. This isn’t the first recommended itinerary because there are more direct and faster ways to get to Rigi Kulm from Switzerland, but I wanted to ride in a boat so I added the “via” stop in Lucerne.

What was more fascinating than the legendary on-time performance and convenient and short connection times of the Swiss public transport network was that I bought trips for the boat, two cog railways, and the return train on a single ticket.

I could have bought a single ticket for the entire trip back in Zurich before I departed but I was in a hurry to catch that 10:04 train and it takes a bit longer to buy a multi-stop journey from the ticket vending machines. (You can also buy the ticket on the website and app, which quoted 98 Swiss Francs, or $96, without the return from Arth-Goldau.)

The second cog railway I took on this trip, to Arth-Goldau, opened in 1875, four years after the first cog railway of the day from Vitznau. That one opened in 1871, the first cog railway in Europe.

If I had missed the 10:04 train, there would have been another train leaving for Lucerne less than 30 minutes later, but I would arrive about 30 minutes early for the next boat and cog railway because they run less frequently.

On the day I traveled, Friday, January 6, the journey took 2 hours and 43 minutes. I checked SBB’s website for this blog post and they recommend a differently, slightly longer journey on weekends, at 3 hours and 1 minute. And they really mean that 1 minute.

The Swiss railway clock’s second hand waits at the 58.5 second mark and proceeds when it receives a “minute impulse” signal from the SBB’s master clock. Train operators then depart.

Get to know the Swiss timetable

The single feed includes the Swiss Federal Railways (SBB), city transit systems, intercity buses like PostAuto, funiculars, cable cars, cog railways, and even chair lifts.

You can take a sesselbahn (chair/ski lift) from Feldis/Veulden to avoid an uphill hike to Mutta; it’s operated by Sesselbahn und Skilifte Feldis AG. You can find its two stops and straight route up the mountain in Transitland’s Feed Registry.

We’re working to import all of them into the Transitland datastore, and we’ll get there eventually (it takes a lot of time to add metadata like an operator’s metropolitan coverage area and canton). For now, though, we’ve added the stops and routes for 11 operators, including all of the ones that covered my trip to Mount Rigi.

Steven’s note: there used to be an embedded map hosted at the following URL:

https://tangrams.github.io/tangram-frame/?noscroll&maxbounds=46.891,7.667,47.501,9.198&url=https://transit.land/images/switzerland-transit/scene.yaml#10.6461/47.1304/8.4492

Edit this map yourself in Tangram Play. These routes were extracted via Mobility Explorer and its direct connection to the Transitland API and I edited some of them because many of routes in the Swiss feed are very simplified.

Which places in Chicago get the most building permits?

December 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

View from the CTA green roof

The Merchandise Mart in the Near North Side community area ranks second place in locations receiving the most building permits.

Ed. note: I changed the title of this blog post because one interpretation of the original, “Where are the most building permits issued in Chicago?”, has the answer “City Hall”, the location of the issuer. My bad. 

Without regard to type or construction cost, the most building permits in the City of Chicago are issued at 11601 W Touhy Ave.

Where is that? It depends on which geocoder you use.

Two buildings at 11601 W Touhy Ave from Google Street View. The City of Chicago has issued thousands of building permits to this address, but the work is actually distributed across the O'Hare airport grounds. Google Maps and the Cook County parcel map places these buildings in Des Plaines.

Two buildings at 11601 W Touhy Ave from Google Street View. The City of Chicago has issued thousands of building permits to this address, but the work is actually distributed across the O’Hare airport grounds. Google Maps and the Cook County parcel map places these buildings in Des Plaines.

Google Maps puts it on this building that’s on a street called “Upper Express Drive” and in the city of Des Plaines, Illinois. But the City of Chicago wouldn’t issue building permits in another city.

Our own geocoder converts the geographic coordinates given in the city’s building permits database for these permits to the address “399 E Touhy Ave, Des Plaines, IL”. The Cook County parcel for the same location has the address “385 E Touhy Ave, Des Plaines, IL”.

Now where is this building?

It’s at O’Hare airport, and it’s one of a handful of addresses* the city’s buildings departments uses to denote permits issued to work at O’Hare. Since 2006 to Saturday, December 12, 2015, there’ve been 2,403 building permits issued here. The permits’ work descriptions indicate that a lot of the work occurs elsewhere on the airport grounds.

13 buildings have had more than 400 permits issued since 2006 to yesterday.

address community area count
11601 W Touhy Ave O’Hare

2403
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz Near North Side

802
141 W Jackson Blvd Loop

538
233 S Wacker Dr Loop

518
2301 S Lake Shore Dr Near South Side

516
30 S Wacker Dr Loop

510
5700 S Cicero Ave Garfield Ridge

495
500 W Madison St Near West Side

482
227 W Monroe St Loop

422
55 E Monroe St Loop

421
875 N Michigan Ave Near North Side

408
151 E Wacker Dr Loop

407
350 N Orleans St Near North Side

401

A pattern emerges: 10 of these 13 buildings are in the Central Business District and the other three are O’Hare airport, McCormick Place (2301 S Lake Shore Drive), and Midway airport (5700 S Cicero Ave).

The first location that’s outside the Central Business District and not one of the city’s airport or its convention center is at 1060 W Addison St – better known as Wrigley Field – in the Lake View community area with 321 building permits issued. It ranks #30. If you keep running down the list, the next most frequently issued location is 7601 S Cicero Ave – that’s the Ford City Mall and I think the city’s only sprawl-style indoor mall. It ranks #39 because it pulls monthly electric maintenance permits.

The Merchandise Mart’s position at #2 is notable because the majority of its permits are for small amounts of work: there is a lot of electrical rewiring done because of the frequent shows and exhibitions in the interior design materials “mall”.

The Mart sees other activity, though, including multi-million renovations for technology companies like Motorola Mobility and Braintree. The Mart also received a permit this year for a new $3 million staircase construction, part of its building-wide renovation project.

Rendering of new main (south) lobby staircase at the Merchandise Mart

This rendering shows a new grand staircase that will be built in the Merchandise Mart’s south lobby jutting from the side of the lobby that’s between the doors on the Chicago River side, and the reception desk and central elevator bank. A building permit issued this fall puts the construction cost at $3 million.

If you want to know more about building trends in Chicago, send me a message through the Chicago Cityscape website and I can put together a custom report for you.

* Other addresses I’ve noticed are:

  • 10000 N Bessie Coleman Dr
  • 10000 W Ohare St
  • 11600 W Touhy Ave
  • 11555 W Touhy Ave

Of these only the two Touhy Ave addresses are logical: O’Hare Street isn’t a real road, and 10000 N Bessie Coleman Dr is much further north than the northernmost point in Chicago.

How to use Chicago Cityscape’s upgraded names search tool

December 7, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Search for names of people who do business in Chicago.

I created a combined dataset of over 2 million names, including contractors, architects, business names, and business owners and their shareholders, from Chicago’s open data portal, and property owners/managers from the property tax database. It’s one of three new features published in the last couple of weeks.

Type a person or company name in the search bar and press “search”. In less than 1 second you’ll get results and a hint as to what kind of records we have.

What should you search?

Take any news article about a Chicago kinda situation, like this recent Chicago Sun-Times article about the city using $8 million in taxpayer-provided TIF district money to move the Harriet Rees house one block. The move made way for a taxpayer-funded property acquisition on which the DePaul/McCormick Place stadium will be built.

The CST is making the point that something about the house’s sale and movement is sketchy (although I don’t know if they showed that anything illegal happened).

There’re a lot of names in the article, but here are some of the ones we can find info about in Chicago Cityscape.

Salvatore Martorina – an architect & building permit expeditor, although this name is connected to a lot of other names on the business licenses section of Cityscape

Oscar Tatosian – rug company owner, who owned the vacant lot to which the Rees house was moved

Bulley & Andrews – construction company which moved the house

There were no records for the one attorney and two law firms mentioned.

How to make a map of places of worship in Cook County using OpenStreetMap data

August 7, 2015 / / 1 Comment

The screenshot shows the configuration you need to find and download places of worship in Cook County, Illinois, using the Overpass Turbo website.

If you’re looking to make a map of churches, mosques, synagogues and other places of worship, you’ll need data.

  • The Yellow Pages won’t help because you can’t download that.
  • And Google Maps doesn’t let you have a slice of their database, either.
  • There’s no open data* for this because churches don’t pay taxes, don’t have business licenses, and aren’t required to register in any way

This where OpenStreetMap (OSM) comes in. It’s a virtual planet that anyone can edit and anyone can have for free.

First we need to figure out what tag people use to identify these places. Sometimes on OSM there are multiple tags that identify the same kind of place. You should prefer the one that’s either more accurate (and mentioned as such in the wiki) or widespread.

The OSM taginfo website says that editors have added over 1.2 million places of worship to the planet using amenity=place_of_worship.

Now that we know which tag to look for, we need an app that will help us get those places, but only within our desired boundary. Open up Overpass Turbo, which is a website that helps construct calls to the Overpass API, which is one way to find and download data from OSM.

Tutorial

In the default Overpass Turbo query, there’s probably a tag in brackets that says [amenity=drinking_fountain]. Change that to say [amenity=place_of_worship] (without the quotes). Now change the viewport of the map to show only the area in which you want Overpass Turbo to look for these places of worship. In the query this argument is listed as ({{bbox}}).

The map has a search bar to find boundaries (cities, counties, principalities, neighborhoods, etc.) so type in “Cook County” and press Enter. The Cook County in Illinois, United States of America, will probably appear first. Select that one and the map will zoom to show the whole county in the viewport.

Now that we’ve set the tag to [amenity=place_of_worship] and moved the map to show Cook County we can click “Run”. In a few seconds you’ll see a circle over each place of worship.

It’s now simple to download: Click on the “Export” button and click “KML” to be able to load the data into Google Earth, “GeoJSON” to load it into a GIS app like QGIS, or “save GeoJSON to gist” to create an instant map within GitHub.

*You could probably get creative and ask a municipality for a list of certificates of occupancy or building permits that had marked “religious assembly” as the zoning use for the property.

Two things I don’t like about TIF expenditures in Chicago

May 11, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Chicago Cityscape's TIF Projects map

I built a map of most Chicago TIF projects that you can filter on the fly. Type in any keyword, alderman’s name, or neighborhood and the map will re-center and zoom to the results.

1. Millions of dollars ($14.4 to be exact) has been or will be given to rich corporations, like Home Depot, to build massive stores with huge roofs and parking lots far away from where people live so everyone has to drive there. It’s highly unlikely they don’t mitigate stormwater runoff (except through temporary storage in a retention pond) or treat any of the water on site, contributing to local flooding and clogged pipes.

According to the project descriptions, property tax payers in these four TIF districts have partially subsidized the construction of over 1,903 car parking spaces and the associated ills of expansive asphalt areas and motorized traffic.

2. A massive subsidy was approved – $96 million – for McCaffery Interests’s Lakeside development on the former U.S. Steel South Works plant to build a mixed-use tower of 250 apartments in an area that has weak transit access and will take decades to fully fill out. We should instead be spending this kind of money building housing in already developed parts of the city (where there’s already amenities, or infrastructure for amenities – the Rezko land comes to mind).

What’s interesting about the Lakeside TIF project approval is that the containing TIF district, “Chicago Lakeside Development Phase 1”, has collected zero property tax revenue because there is no property in it!

Trolley on the future Lake Shore Drive

A tour bus drivers on the Lakeside development. Photo by Ann Fisher.

There are some projects I like, though. TIF has been used frequently to build affordable housing, housing for seniors, and housing for people who need assistance. 78 out of 380 projects mention the word “affordable”.

The City Hyde Park building, designed by Studio Gang Architects, will have 20% of its residential units designated as “affordable”, for families (of varying sizes) earning up to 60 percent of the area median income. The city standard is 10 percent but developers are also able to pay an “in lieu” fee so they don’t have to build the affordable units and instead can offer those units at market rates.

Other projects have a majority of affordable units.