OutsideinDC: A Guide to Biking in Washington, DC
Find Bike Routes, Monitor Bike Theft, and Get a Bike
OutsideinDC is a guide to biking in Washington, DC where you can find detailed bike routes for commuting or fun, monitor bike theft in real time, and use Craigslist to shop for equipment. It’s a community space, so if you have a tip or want to sound off on biking in DC, just add #dcbike to a twitter message and it will show up on the front page of this site.
We built this site for the Apps for Democracy competition. If you like OutsideinDC, vote for it!. The competition closes at 11:59 on Wednesday, November 12. The purpose of the competition is to show what great community tools – like this site – are possible when governments open up their data and let people use it. OutsideinDC is built entirely on open source software and is the only app in the competition to be 100% open source. The site is built on Drupal, and there’s no google maps here, just Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit, which is drawing all the maps and has awesome anti-aliasing rendering.
The DC government’s decision to make its data more publicly accessible will make the city a better place to live for its residents. We hope that this is only the beginning of the data the DC government makes available. (There are rumors that if this competition is well received, the government will open up an additional 200 data sets.) More freely available information is almost always a good thing, and it will lead to more websites like this one that take open data and make it useful for DC residents.
We used a few key ingredients from the DC Data Catalog to make OutsideinDC.
We pulled the crime data from MPD Crime incidents, and have the site populated for all bike thefts in 2008 thanks to the custom crime download option.
This information shown on the maps is all being pulled from the DC Data Catalog:
- Bicycle Lane
- Bike Routes – Signed
- DC Boundary Map
- Metro Stations
- DC Neighborhood Clusters Shapefile
- DC Streets Shapefile
- Waterbodies Shapefiles
The shopping information is from Craigslist.
Lastly, the twitter hash tag just sucks in a feed off search.twitter.com.
Go check out the site and let us know what you think.
3 Comments
Validity of Crime Data
The site looks great, very stimulating, and the upside could be tremendous.
I must confess though that the usage of the crime data set makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. The data is highly questionable, and I find its service sketchy at best. The bike policy in the city, which has changed recently, required bike registration for residents, occasionally causing random impounding of bikes, and reports of missing bikes are questionable at best… Do they indicate areas of higher risk or areas of higher reporting of missing bikes? Does bike theft correlate with any other type of crime in the city? With violent crimes, with gentrifying neighborhoods, with police districts? Dunno… Understanding areas of risk for bicycle accidents for instance might be far more useful and interesting, even areas with reported potholes :-p but that is another data story. Police also used to stock bikes found that if not reclaimed, were given up to charities and-or auctioned, that could also be potentially interesting data to browse through.
Cheers,
Daniel
Hi Daniel, You raise a good
Hi Daniel,
You raise a good point here. With this site, we wanted to make a proof of concept to show the DC government what could be done with their data and hopefully encourage them to release more and better data streams. Which would be great and would certainly help us make this site better : ) And I totally agree that getting data on bike accidents up there would be ideal.
Bonnie
A legend for the map would
A legend for the map would be helpful. Love it overall; beautifully crafted.