So the Ann Arbor DDA has a dumb page listing available parking spots in the five big, vertical parking structures around downtown Ann Arbor. It’s just a dump of how many spots are free (and there are always spots free); no feeds or time series or what have you.
We fight with the civic infrastructure we have, not the civic infrastructure we want to have.
So here’s a CSV dump of the actual data, updated every 20 minutes. Please use it for whatever you like.
And here’s a short Python script if you just want the data yourself:
from urllib2 import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen("http://a2dda.org/parking.php"))
for row in soup('tr')[1:]:
structure, spots = row.contents
structure = structure.contents[0]
spots = spots.contents[0].split(' ')[1]
print structure, spots
Update 2008-04-04: See also my next post for more fun.
Edward Vielmetti | 04-Apr-08 at 12:18 am | Permalink
nice.
i’m starting to collect bus on-time data as well, and have some initial results to graph performance - it’s more data than the parking structures, but it should have some similar level of civic infrastructure interest.
John Weise | 04-Apr-08 at 2:03 am | Permalink
I couldn’t help myself. I had some fun with the parking data too.
Ian Jones | 04-Apr-08 at 8:03 am | Permalink
Cool! You must have been the genesis of all the hacks last night. My own angle (goaded by Bob Kuehne) was uploading the data to a Google Spreadsheet, but CSV seems like more bang for the buck. Plus mine isn’t cronned yet so there’s about to be a data gap.
John’s map is very cool. (And I’d love to see Ed’s bus data.)
TeacherPatti | 04-Apr-08 at 5:46 pm | Permalink
John’s map rocks! I like the Python script…just today during my prep hour, I was reading the math book that I have for the 8th grade. It is so old that it actually contains a section on BASIC, the first and last computer programming that I actually knew well :) :)