Steven can plan

We all woke up this morning to see news that another earthquake has happened in Haiti, near the center of the first one eight days ago.

“The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) employed nearly 400 Haitians in cash-for-work activities to jump start the local economy and facilitate the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian assistance.”

This post is an update to my previous article about how GIS is used for disaster relief efforts. I recently came across a webpage on Harvard’s China Earthquake Geospatial Research Portal that lists copious, up-to-date, GIS-compatible data from organizations around the world. The portal began in response to the Sichuan, China, earthquake in May 2008.

Visit the Haiti GIS Data Portal now.

For new GIS students, this would be a great starting point for a class final project. The Portal is hosting the datasets as a public service and invites anyone with relevant data to submit it to the site operators for wider dissemination. Data comes from the United Nations, several universities, OpenStreetMap contributors, and the German Center for Air and Space Travel, among others.

“Petty Officer 3rd Class Cameron Croteau, a Damage Controlman aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Oak, carries an injured Haitian girl to an awaiting Coast Guard HH-60 Jayhawk helicopter Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010. Coast Guard and Navy helicopters airlifted injured Haitians to a private hospital in Milot, Haiti. U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Brandyn Hill.”

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are many photos on Flickr when you search for “haiti earthquake.” When I wrote the post on January 14, 2010, there were only about 300 photos, and now there are over 6,900. Only 1,200 have a Creative Commons license, though (both of the photos above have a Creative Commons license). It seems that the United States Military, the United Nations, and major relief organizations are providing the majority of photos. And they’re uploading them fast. The number of photos on Flickr jumped by 50 from when I started this paragraph.

While Geographic Information systems software can definitely produce pretty maps, its power lies in analyzing data and plotting or comparing sensory or observed data to spatial data (like roads or terrain). The earthquake in Haiti rocked the capital city, Port-au-Prince with a shock of magnitude 7.0 on Tuesday, January 12, 2010.

A photo from a United States military flyover shows damage in the Port of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Photo taken by Petty Officer 2nd Class Sondra-Kay Kneen and uploaded by Chuck Simmins.

There are several applications for GIS to help with earthquake response, and two blog posts that appeared this morning shed light on how.

The first article came from ESRI, the California-based makers of ArcGIS, the most used GIS application. The article linked to a user-built map on their ArcGIS Online service showing on Bing maps where the earthquake and its aftershocks struck (the map sits behind a registration wall). ESRI even has a disaster response team that helps organizations get their response projects off the ground quickly.

Infrastructurist posted the second article, showing some before and after satellite imagery of Haiti, provided by Google and GeoEye.

So what can GIS do? From ESRI’s list, “GIS for Disaster Response“:

• Rapid identification of potential shelter/housing locations (schools, libraries, churches, public buildings) appropriate for supporting affected populations.
• Determine how many tents will be needed based on the location of populations affected by the disaster.
• Analyze areas where large numbers of refugees can establish camps out of harm’s way that are accessible for supply delivery and have access to water and other resources necessary to support large numbers of people.
• Many more examples.

Want more information? Here’s where to get it:

• Haitian rapper, Wyclef Jean, is soliciting donations via text message to Yéle. So far, the program has raised at least $1 million. Before you donate to Yéle, though, read The Smoking Gun’s article about the organization’s “funny money.”
• Boston.com, home of the Boston Globe, has posted a second series of photos. Some are graphic and hidden until you activate them.
• The White House has advice on how Americans can help.
• Various people and relief agencies (like Red Cross, Salvation Army and United Nations) have posted at least 300 photos to Flickr. I noticed a couple were taken with mobile phones, so I’m glad regular people are also uploading what they see.
• If you’re looking for real news about the earthquake, avoid FOX News because it is dedicating too much space on the internet and time on television to covering non-news quips from Pat Robertson and others of his low-class ilk.
• The New York Times published an article on Wednesday about how poor building practices played into the destruction.
• The United States Geological Survey, the government agency that tracks seismic activity worldwide, has a variety of maps and technical information about the Haiti earthquake.

Like any good website owner and author, I track statistics (or analytics as people like to call them now). The most important information the reports tell me is how people found my site: either through keyword searches, or links from related webpages.

Recently, a visitor came across my site because of a search for “amtrak routes gis.” I suspect they were looking for shapefiles they could load into Geographic Information System software containing Amtrak routes and stations. My blog showed up on the second results page in Google and they came to my post, “Why Amtrak’s not on time,” about the factors that influence the passenger rail company’s timeliness. The page doesn’t have what the visitor wants.

I decided to update my page, “Find urban data,” to aid future visitors. Also, if one person is looking for this information, it’s likely that others want it, too. I found the information, “amtrak routes gis,” in two places and in two formats.

First, the United States Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics publishes national data in the “National Transportation Atlas.” You can find a shapefile with Amtrak stations. For Amtrak routes you must download the railway network shapefiles and then filter the information for the attributes that describe Amtrak.

The second source is an interactive KML file (more about KML) that you can load into Google Earth, view in Google Maps, or manipulate in another KML-compatible application.

First, let’s talk about Chicago’s bike parking news.

The Chicago Bicycle Parking Program, in August 2008, launched a web application that “does three things” (straight from the website) for Chicago residents: allows them to request a new bike rack; allows them to track their request; allows them to find existing and requested bike parking locations.* We call it the “Public Interface” in the office.

In the past three weeks, our “bike parking locator” was featured on:

• Chicago Reader
• Cyclelicious
• GapersBlock (via Chicago Reader)
• RedEye – “How much bike parking is in your ‘hood?” – This piece excited me the most. It was printed and distributed to thousands of Chicagoans on Friday, December 11, 2009! The article included a map based on the data that anyone can download from the Public Interface’s advanced search page.

Scan of article printed in the 12/11/09 publication of the RedEye, a Chicago Tribune tabloid-style newspaper.

Screenshot of the Advanced Search page in the Bike Parking Public Interface web application.

Now let’s move on to the news in New York City. The Bicycle Access to Office Buildings Law went into effect on December 11, 2009. Briefly, the law says buildings with at least one freight elevator and without listed exceptions must create a “bicycle access plan” for residents/tenants upon request. For interested tenants of building owners and managers, the NYC Department of Transportation’s “Bikes in Buildings” website is the first stop. It describes the process and offers tenants and building owners and managers an automatic request generator or plan builder. This also helps the NYC DOT track requests and deal with exception requests. In the spirit of President Obama’s desire for government openness and the Office of Management and Budget’s recently released “Open Government Direction,” I hope NYC DOT publishes the information it holds.

Streetsblog has posted a roundup of its previous articles leading up to the bill’s passing in July 2009.

*Disclaimer: I coded the web application. My boss was also involved, mainly in directing how it should function and what it should say (he’s way better at copywriting than I am). I also got help from someone who’s blind to test the accessibility of the website.

Earlier this year, Google Maps added a feature to the common maps interface that allows users to identify problems* with map data or presentation. Click on the “Report A Problem” link in the lower right corner of the current map view. Then drag the marker on top of the error, categorize it, then write a description of the problem.

I reported several problems soon after the feature was released. I checked up on the results of one problem I reported. The situation was the lakefront multi-use path along Lake Michigan in Chicago, Illinois. The screenshots below show the map before I reported the problem and the repaired map.

With this addition, Google Maps seems to be encroaching on the territory of Open Street Map (OSM) that uses ONLY public domain (not the same as free) and user-contributed data. But the data users contribute to Google Maps (in the form of reporting problems on the map) become the property of Google and its data providers.

From the OSM Wiki, “The copyright of the whole data set is scattered among all contributors. Some contributors release their contributions to the public domain.” Readers interested in learning more about maps in the public domain should read this Guardian article about the UK’s Ordnance Survey heavy grip on its data.

Disclaimer: I felt prompted to write this post because James Fee on his blog often (1st) writes (2nd) about the (low) quality of the data Google puts in its Maps.

*Users have long been able to report problems, but never in such an easy way or one that tracks reports and notifies the user when Google fixes the error.