Category: Tools

I’m on the home stretch for first update to Chicago Offline Bike Map app

May 6, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Splash screen of the app. 

Since making the first version of the Chicago Offline Bike Map app, a bike map stored in your iOS device and doesn’t need an Internet connection, I’ve made several important changes and added new features. I’ve upgraded twice how train stations will be appearing. I’ve completely changed the way it looks by using jQueryMobile. Also with v0.2 you’ll find more points of interest, locate yourself using the iOS device hardware (results will vary on a variety of hardware and location factors), and zoom to any neighborhood.

I want your help. I want to make a list of at least 20 points of interest. I’ve no qualifications, but this is who I think my target audience is: people who have cycled in Chicago for a while, people who have just started cycling, people who have iOS devices (I will expand to Android eventually), and who know how to use a map.

Current points of interest are:

  • All CTA and Metra stations
  • All neighborhoods
  • Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum
  • Field Museum of Natural History
  • Museum of Science and Industry
  • DuSable Museum
  • Harold Washington Cultural Center
  • Chicago Cultural Center
  • Holography Museum
  • Museum of Contemporary Art
  • Chicago City Hall
  • Chicago Velo Campus
  • Millennium Park Bike Station
  • SAIC Bike Fixit Station

Train stations on the map. 

Excluding train stations and neighborhoods, there are 12 points of interest. What else should I add? (Since posting this I’ve added the three largest libraries: Harold Washington Library Center, Woodson Regional, and Sulzer Regional.)

P.S. I plan to make an Android version of this app, but I have no timeline on that. Follow app development at the app’s Tumblr.

BikeLock app based on dataset I opened up

April 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bike parking at Daley Plaza, downtown Chicago. 

It’s really cool to see work you did “go places”. A friend of mine who works at Groupon just linked me to an iOS app called BikeLock that finds bike racks near you on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. It’s based on bike rack location data in the City of Chicago’s Data Portal. (The data on there is old, while the data in the public API I built is real time.)

Download it from the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The developer is Mike Jahn, another Groupon staffer. You can get the same information for free, though, on my mostly mobile-friendly Can I bring my bike on Metra? web app, and a website I made for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT).

A screenshot of the Can I bring my bike on Metra? bike rack finder website. 

That data comes straight from the Bike Parking Web Application I started developing in 2008 soon after I started working in the Chicago Bicycle Program. It was good that my supervisor had the same perspectives I did about open and transparent data and work. But it didn’t start like that; here’s the full story:

My first job at the Bicycle Parking Program was to deal with abandoned bikes, get them off the street. I was taught the existing method of keeping track of my work, but I used my programming skills (in PHP, MySQL, and with the Google Maps API) to develop a web application that tracked it faster and mapped out the abandoned bikes I had to visit and tag with a notice. I was using this for a few days or few weeks and then show my boss. His reaction was something like, “Great! Now make one for bike racks!”

Why? Well, let’s take this quote from Judy Baar Topinka, Illinois comptroller, speaking Tuesday about her office’s new website, The Ledger, which lists the state’s unpaid bills among other financial data.

“The object of the exercise is to make everything that we know of in the comptroller’s office public. If we know it, you’ll know it.” WBEZ

I made one for bike racks. I created two environments, one for private administration at the office (“Bike Parking Web Application”) and one for the public (“public interface”). A later feature I added to the public interface was the Advanced Search. This allows you to filter by Ward, Community Area, and Status. You can then choose your sorting method. A map will appear above the results. You can download the results as either an XLS file, and XLS file that’s designed to be imported in GIS programs (like QGIS), or a KML file.

I’m aware of just one other app that uses this data set: MassUp.us. I don’t know if MassUp uses the real-time API that my Metra bike rack finder uses.

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.

Last minute vote on bicycle data visualization project

November 28, 2011 / / 0 Comments

The United States Department of Transportation is holding a data visualization competition and Chicago bike crash locations are one of the topics.

From Michael Carney:

I started this project because, basically, I thought it would be interesting to make a map of bike crash locations around Chicago and present it to my GIS class at UIC. Sebastian Lew and I collaborated for several months and it evolved into something more. Using ArcGIS, we were able to symbolize streets by level of overall crash intensity, calculate crashes per mile on streets, perform hot spot analysis to identify areas with high numbers of crashes, compare ridership levels with crash levels, examine temporal trends in crash activity, and perhaps most importantly, assess the effectiveness (at least at a basic level) of current bicycle infrastructure. At the very least I hope our project can help you plan a safe route to work, at the most I hope it can be used by policymakers and planners when considering how and where to expand Chicago’s bike infrastructure.

Vote today only. View the project.

Cycle mapping

November 10, 2011 / / 13 Comments

A screenshot of Critical Map: Milano. 

What are the sites that will let you either draw or upload a bike route to share with others?

And what are the sites or mobile apps that give you cycle routing?

A screenshot of Bike Share Map: London, UK.

And other bike-related maps?

I’m just simply researching and collecting links to cycling-related map mashups and apps.