To all those in Boulder or the Boulder area, I will be giving a talk at the next meeting of Boulder Ruby Group, on December 18th. I'll be talking about the SMS polling location finder I put together last month, as well as SMS apps in general and their potential to keep people involved. It's my first talk, so it's bound to be awkward and uncomfortable to watch.
I spent early December collecting locations of SEPTA buses and I've had fun playing with them in Processing. I have a bunch of rough pictures (like the one above) so far, but I'm hoping to develop more visualizations as I get more comfortable with Processing.
The attack ads for this upcoming election have been driving me insane these past few months. I am pretty sure people all over the country feel the same, but it seems much worse living in a swing state. The candidates also visit this area often, shutting down major highways and streets when they visit and causing massive headaches for the citizens in the area. No matter what the outcome is after November 6th, the end of the election will be a breath of relief for the most of us.
you and me both, little girl on the internet.
So while browsing twitter in between talks during RubyConf this past weekend, it surprised me I when took interest in an election-related tweet by Philadelphia's Chief Data Officer, Mark Headd:
The Google Civic Information API is a service that provides polling locations, early voting locations, candidate information, and other official election information by election year. I was intrigued by the service and immediately wrote a super simple gem to easily access the data with ruby.
The open data community in Philadelphia created a SMS-based polling locator during their past few elections to provide a way for internetless households to quickly find their voting location. Does Boulder/Denver have a service like that? How about other places in the US? The answer seemed to point to no, so I created my own service using the gem I wrote, Sinatra, Twilio, and Heroku.
If you want it try it out yourself, text your address to 484-477-0738.
While creating the project, I found myself getting more excited about the election and the importance it held for me as an American citizen. As I was finishing up the app, an Obama canvasser stopped by my apartment to make sure I knew where my polling location was for this Tuesday's election. I proudly made her stay an extra 30 seconds to look at my creation (I think she was only mildly impressed). Had she stopped by two days earlier, I probably would have been much more curt and sarcastic with her.
This project taught me that's insanely easy to set up a simple SMS-based application using Sinatra, Heroku, and Twilio. Why not create more text messaging tools for major events and emergencies (such as Sandy)? And it also taught me that getting involved with open data is a great way to dissolve cynicism about government.
Edit: I should add that Twilio has offered so much support for this project!
I've been lucky enough to visit (and live in!) several cities during the past few years. Toronto was the last major city I visited outside of my home in the Boulder/Denver metro area. While walking around Toronto on a normal weekday, I noticed the lack of bicycles - on the streets, at least. I was almost hit by bicyclists several times on crowded sidewalks in the middle of the city. Seeing bicyclists on sidewalks normally causes me to go into fits of rage, but I couldn't see how they could ride safely on the streets. I noticed that many two lane city streets could barely fit two cars, side by side. Buses and street car tracks were everywhere, both giant dangers for cyclists. It made me wonder about the number of designated bike routes in Toronto and how it compared to other cities. So I did a little digging and mapping and came up with a few observations.
Denver:
Toronto:
While looking at Toronto's and Denver's bike networks, I noticed that Toronto is lacking a proper "network" of safe, clearly marked bike lanes and paths that span the entire city. Many of Toronto's bike paths seem to be disconnected or remain as recreational paths (squiggly lines along rivers and parks), where as the Denver bike network is laid out like a grid. It's not uncommon for people out in the Denver area to commute from one end of the city to the other (for example, a person living near downtown Denver and could easily cycle to the Denver Tech Center in the south end). There is even a bike lane directly to/from the airport.
Philadelphia:
I noticed similarities between Philadelphia and Toronto's bike networks. West Philadelphia has a pretty nice bike network (for Drexel/UPenn students?), but Center City is an especially difficult place to bike. Cobblestone streets out east in Old City are a huge pain for cyclists.
San Francisco:
Not surprising that the bike-friendly San Francisco has a connected bike network.
Traffic and transportation is a huge issue in any city - where ever you have people, you are going to have cars. Bicycles cut down on the number of cars on the road at any given time, which also frees up parking spaces and traffic for street cars and buses. Cars can even be prohibitively expensive in cities, with extra costs from parking and permits. Unfortunately, cycling can be very dangerous without clearly designated bike routes.
I used Tilemill and Mapbox to handle the plotting and map styling of the project, which can be seen here. You can look at a few other cities, such as Vancouver and New York City and see how they compare.