So there’s this data. What are people doing with it?
@jweise made an Mapufacture map by way of his scraped feed.
One thing Mapufacture lets you do is view the map in Google Earth, with a pinpoint for each structure and spot availability behind each marker.
In a comment on my last post, Ian Jones mentioned using a Google Spreadsheet to track this data, but I haven’t seen the spreadsheet.
Seems like a good use case for EditGrid, actually.
Again, here’s the data source we’re all working from and the CSV file I’m logging the data to, updated three times an hour.
Finally, the total number of spots in each structure, buried in a bunch of asinine PDFs at the DDA:
- 4th and Washington — 282
- 4th and William — 987
- Ann and Ashley — 840
- Forest — 854
- Liberty — 573
- Maynard — 797
Ian Jones | 05-Apr-08 at 4:26 pm | Permalink
Thanks for digging out the capacities (and for uncovering the dda feed in the first place!)
I put the spreadsheet url in the “Your url” field and it wound up semi-concealed in the link behind my name. Here it is unburied:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pzjJykSbn6vJPTxMegpcgXg&hl=en, or http://tinyurl.com/ywydrl if that gets mangled by word wrap.
It’s set to be readable by the public, although “public” in this case seems to mean “anybody logged into the Googleplex” rather than public public.
Haven’t tried EditGrid yet — are there advantages over Google docs?
Andrea | 06-Apr-08 at 12:45 pm | Permalink
Y’know, for all the (well deserved) griping, at least you have something like this in A2. No such luck in less techie towns…
Just for a completely stupid comparison, Syracuse has bus maps that don’t show how the routes overlap. At all. There is no overview map that I’ve been able to find, which makes the route maps almost completely useless. They don’t show cross streets either - just the bus route, no context of any kind. :(
Brian | 06-Apr-08 at 2:20 pm | Permalink
Ian: Thanks for the link. My entire exposure to EditGrid is by way of Alan Gutierrez, who is using it to track demolition permits in New Orleans. He wrote some notes about EditGrid’s front end and API.
@anikarenina: Yeah, data is better than no data. And hell, I don’t even drive to work unless the bus isn’t running (in which case a free parking spot is easy to find). But it’s the principle of the thing. When it comes to the DDA and other organizations like that, you gotta stare deeply into the mouth of each gift horse.
Andrew Turner | 13-Apr-08 at 8:37 pm | Permalink
Andrea: the beauty of this project was that people outside the system took what was available and made it better and more accessible.
I would suggest you could easily create an overview map of routes using something like Google MyMaps.
Of course, you could then bring this (via KML) into Mapufacture and overlay potentially with bus tracking information or even just local events from Upcoming.org.
As an example, I took the parking map and added some other local Ann Arbor information.
Regarding EditGrid, they recently added (based on Alan’s request and working with them) KML export. So that’s another good option. You can also pull out a full RSS/Atom feed from Mapufacture of to get the “history” of the parking structures.