Maps

, ,

Summer Intern Cohort Reflection

, ,
Summer Intern Cohort Reflection

Over the summer our office was fortunate to have hosted a cohort of very bright and driven interns, you’ve met them in a few of our previous blog posts you can read HERE. During our time together we had the pleasure and privilege to get to know these wonderful young women and work alongside them on a number of different projects and programs where their fresh perspectives and ideas proved to be invaluable to us. Before they left us to get back to their studies at Harvard and Syracuse University we asked them to summarize the work they completed with us over the 8-week internship and to highlight some of their favorite projects. Please read on to see how their summer went and all the great work that they helped us to accomplish!

Spatial Data – the Roadmap to Data Analysis in the City of Syracuse

Spatial Data – the Roadmap to Data Analysis in the City of Syracuse

We use spatial data every day – navigating from point A to point B, delivery of mail and packages to an address, identifying boundaries of our homes. Spatial data is some of the most useful data to communicate information; we can communicate where something is, how far away it is, how we can navigate there, and aggregate to spatial shapes (i.e., your street block or zip code) to identify characteristics of an area. Spatial data is information captured in a shape - think points, lines, or polygons. Information stored in these shapes then allows us to map the information in relation to other information. This can include how close or far away something is, how big or small something is, and how two areas of information compare to something near it (how does your neighbor impact you?).

The City produces spatial data often to help us communicate the narrative of key information to residents. This can vary across a wide variety of topics, from where water main breaks are happening, to what streets are closed for road reconstruction, to what neighborhood an address belongs to, to how close a school is to a resident’s house, or to the last time a snow plow cleared the road a citizen is traveling on. All of this information is communicated clearly and concisely through maps comprised of spatial data. In this post, we will explore several examples of how the City uses spatial data to measure and improve services.

, ,

A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

, ,
A Successful Deployment of the City of Syracuse's Snow Plow Map: What it Does, What We've Learned, and What We Plan to Do

Syracuse is no stranger to snow – historically we see an average of 124 inches a year and tend to be in the top 5 snowiest big cities in the country (from the Golden Snow Globe Competition). In an effort to share how we operate during a storm, we developed a snowplow map that shows when a street was last plowed.

Our Deputy Chief Innovation & Data Officer, Conor Muldoon, wrote a post outlining what led up to our current snowplow map and the potential impact of it right before we launched the tool in December here.

We have had several snow storms since the launch of the City’s Snow Plow map (ESRI’s Winter Weather Operations tool) the first week of December 2021. We successfully launched the tool to the public with the first large storm in January, tracking the plowed status of streets for three days, and saw around 12,000 hits over the course of the storm to the public viewer. We continue to maintain high engagement during the storms after, seeing consistent views of the tool throughout the storm’s length.