Render on justbartek.ca
Spawned from a Twitter thread, this is a open data set of publicly available bike parking in and around (and sometimes well beyond!) Halifax.
The map aims to be a detailed view of bike parking inventory. This means street-level positioning and labeling of bike racks into appropriate categories, with the intent that when someone on a bike is planning a route, they can have clarity as to how, and if, they can safely lock up their bicycle.
This repository includes the .geojson file which is a regular export of the
map details.
Parking data is broken up into two parts. First, there is a base.geojson file which contains a variety of spots initially mapped, without quality tagging. As a result, these initially mapped spots are plotted grey on the map. The end goal is to remove this and drop the merge process.
The second source of data is a photo library contained on my iCloud account. The data is obtained using dogsheep/fetch.py script and then merged with data.geojson using merge.sh. This process can likely be improved, but it works for the time being.
dogsheep-photos apple-photos photos.db
ALBUM="hfxbikeparking" python dogsheep/fetch.py > partial.geojson
./merge.sh && mv merged.geojson data.geojson
Then commit the diff to push new maps up. The resulting data.geojson is the authoritative source.
In addition to being a potentially useful utility, the data contained within this map may serve as a means of advocacy. Some ideas:
- Analysing bike parking facilities on retail strips
- Identifying inconsistent or unusable (e.g wheel slot) inventory
- Identifying infrastructure that needs repair
- Etc..