The City of Portland’s new CivicApps program is looking for software developers to take city data and turn it into applications “that address civic issues and benefit the greater Portland community.”
The contest comes with the release of more than 100 open source datasets from jurisdictions around the region, like Metro, City of Portland, TriMet, and others. Among the datasets released — along with crime, permits, parks, and so on — is one for the bicycle network. This of course begs the question — Which one of you bike-loving code junkies out there will turn this bike wonkery into the next great mobile or web-based app?
To whet your appetite, here’s the bike network dataset description:
“This linear feature class contains the citywide network of the following bicycle facility types: bicycle boulevards, bike lanes, multi-use trails and signed connections. A status field indicates if the network feature is active, planned or recommended. Other attribution includes segment name (location description), project ID, year built and some pavement marking information.”
Check out CivicApps.org for more info.
They’ve got a cool data set for bike parking too (the fact that every staple in Portland is geocoded is amazing).
http://www.civicapps.org/datasets/bicycle-parking
I’m pretty sure OpenStreetMap will have a use for this data. You can already get OpenStreetMap’s bicycle data on mobile devices such as Android-based phones and Garmin GPS.