Bike data

[vonbearshark]

The Bike Pittsburgh organization provides a lot of useful information, lots of it is incorporated in WPRDC's datasets. Would be great to add this to other other data we get.

[vonbearshark]

Here's a dataset for marked bake lanes: https://data.wprdc.org/dataset/on-road-bicycle-pavement-markings/resource/90fb26be-e754-4f45-b695-d17f0645dd2b. This might be able to be combined with our analysis of dangerous intersections #67

[mbabatunde]

I'd be interested in taking this on. How exactly would you like this dataset to incorporated?

[vonbearshark]

Good question. Right now we don't have any intersection data, really, so we'll just focus on the marked bike lane maps. This will be our first non-pin drawing on the map, but we'll probably like to draw a path, maybe a blue one, along the marked bikes lanes available. Possibly using a polyline from Leaflet: http:https://leafletjs.com/reference.html#polyline

[brlodi]

Just an added note, this will take some parsing and computation. The dataset is inconsistently formatted text listing street and cross street, without any included spatial information. Even the 'type' column is inconsistent between semantically identical values.

[drw]

@saylorsd and I looked at this dataset and agree that it should be made more useful. Since BikePGH made that animated GIF showing the bike lanes going in over time, they must have a Google Map that they've added the lanes to. I am going to contact the data steward for this dataset and see if we can get those lanes exported as a KML file and/or some other shapefile format, with the intention of publishing such a file.

Feel free to mention @saylorsd and me whenever some WPRDC data is not as good as it could be, and we'll see what we can do to improve it.

[drw]

The BikePGH guy got back to me very quickly. Their Pittsburgh bike infrastructure map is actually available on the BikePGH web site. I just downloaded the KML file from there and converted it into GeoJSON (which is probably the geospatial file format that you want to use). You can find both those files on the updated version of the BikePGH dataset.

If for some reason you need it, the Google Map also offers a "network link" KML file that will automatically stay updated with the latest changes to the Google Map. We can also work on automating the updating of our KML and GeoJSON files.

Compared to the CSV file in the dataset, the only thing that the GeoJSON file lacks that you might want for analysis of historical crash data (#67) is the year that the bike lane markings were added.

The map and the resulting files actually have seven layers, which I think means four more sets of features than the original CSV file of bike pavement markings. The extra layers are "trails", "Bridges", "On-Street Bike Route", and "Cautionary On-Street Bike Route". If you want clarification on these bike routes or if you'd like different file formats or any other help, just let us know.

[vonbearshark]

Really neat link coming from Bob: http:https://www.bikepgh.org/2017/02/27/upitt-publishes-interactive-campus-bike-map/. Wonder where this data comes from

[brlodi]

It looks to be pulling from the Google Maps API, so presumably someone at the University is maintaining a custom My Maps dataset with these points. We could probably make our own API call to get the point data and then map it ourself on Leaflet.