Transit Apps for Philly Hackathon 2013; Unlocking Philadelphia

Accessibility, Civic Hacking, Open Data
Two hours to go

Final countdown to demos (photo by Mark Headd)

Last month I participated in a Civic Hackathon called Transit Apps for Philly.  It was a fun and rewarding experience.

I pitched an idea called Unlock Philadelphia: an application that would help people with disabilities, parents with strollers and older people to find accessible stations and transit information. By combining transit data with with Yelp’s API, I wanted to investigate the possibility of finding accessible shops, restaurants and other services close to accessible stations.
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Mapping Open Traffic Accident Data

Civic Hacking, Nottingham, Open Data, Traffic, , ,

Nottinghamshire Traffic Accidents

Open Data Nottingham released traffic accident data earlier this year covering incidents in Nottinghamshire for the last four years.  For reported accidents, persons are listed (anonymously) if they suffer slight, severe or fatal injuries.  Drivers are identified, along with age/gender, but only if they are injured.  The quality and format of the data is good. Continue reading →

Philly Bus Explorer prototype

Open Data

I live in Old City, Philadelphia and was thinking how great it would be to walk out of my door at the just the right time to get one of the buses that take me to work.  I was also curious to see all the bus routes that pass through individual neighborhoods of Philly to understand the network better.  Filtering routes by neighborhood allows us to see where we can get to without giving a destination.

This led me to create this app. The drop-down allows selection of neighborhood and refreshes a large Google Map that shows routes and bus locations that pass through that neighborhood. Arrows and icons clearly show the bus direction and clicking on routes/buses shows extra information.

Philly Bus Explorer screenshot

Behind the scenes, the ‘routes by neighborhood’ are stored in MongoDB and REST queries are made to a simple Ruby/Sinatra app. The route KML and bus locations are fed by the SEPTA APIs.

More at Github.