Reinventing the Wheel
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Connect 2020 OSM10 / 27
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:00
And so thanks for tuning in. I will be talking about a data collection tool that Russ and I and the others at Shared Streets have been building over the past year. We call this the curb wheel. A little bit of context for why we built it. So Shared Streets is a non-profit and we build open source software to help city governments and private industry communicate about transportation data and manage streets. And something that's been a really hot topic in
00:24
the last few years is access to the curb. So this used to be parking, but now there's a lot of competition for space from TNCs like Lyft and Uber, for the millions of Amazon deliveries that come, for now dining in the area of COVID, for things like Stay Healthy Streets. And so there's a lot of
00:44
competition for this space. And what we're seeing is cities that want to be able to reimagine how they use street space, maybe incorporate some more dynamic uses that change over the course of the day, and have reduced friction around payment and how we actually use that curb.
01:02
So this becomes a lot easier if we can start to map out the space and do it a lot more comprehensively. Right now a lot of changes are happening on an ad hoc basis, especially because of COVID, but overall cities are going to want to step back and have a more cohesive strategy around this. Curb data is hard to map. I gave a talk on that last year. There's the link
01:23
at the bottom. So I'm not going to get into that, but in the past year we've been thinking about how we actually collect that. We started working on an open data specification, and the question now is how do cities actually collect data and store it in that format? And the current state of the practice is there are some cities like Washington DC
01:41
that are using street level imagery, and then they will go through and digitize things. There's others that are using apps like Art Collector. There's others that are using kind of an app that has a built-in pedometer. Anything that's on the high-tech side tends to have some accuracy issues that come from the triangulation, from GPS, especially from urban
02:01
canyoning, from pedometer just isn't that accurate. On the low-tech end of the spectrum there are folks that go out with a wheel and a clipboard and they end up with really accurate measurements, but it takes forever to get that from a pen and paper over to an annotation on a digital street on a map. We also tried some open source tools like Open Map Kit, Open Data Kit,
02:22
field papers, which was actually my favorite, to just see what's out there that maybe we could build onto and augment. And in the end we weren't totally happy with any of these, so we started working on a new tool. It's designed to kind of be the best of both worlds where we get the precision measurement along the line that you get with a measuring wheel with the ease of
02:42
entering that data and attaching it to an actual street geometry that you get from an app. So enter the curb wheel and I'll hand it over to Russ to explain how this works. Great, so as Emily has explained we've built a brand new tool that combines the mobility of a measuring wheel and an open source application to build and map curbs into our
03:06
curb LR format. Go ahead, next slide. So what we set out to build was we wanted something that was really affordable and easy, but also would have open source components so that almost anybody could create the build one of these and use them. There are some very expensive tools that are
03:25
proprietary, so ours runs under a hundred dollars total and just requires a little bit of soldering skills and screwing skills. So that's fine, go ahead and do the next one.
03:41
So the way this works is we have a measuring wheel that's been hardwired into the Raspberry Pi and that sends a Bluetooth signal of the measurements as you go down. We ingest OpenStreetMap streets and parse those and that allows you to access those streets on our application that you can then pick which side of the street you're on because you'll have curbs
04:05
on either side of the street. And then I think the most interesting piece of this is that you can then begin to measure along that street and measure concurrent features across that of that curb because you can often have parking areas, fire hydrants, different features that
04:20
are in the same space. Also this data is pretty complex and so we do have the ability to take a photo and that will allow you to get a lot more information after the fact. So the final piece of this is our digitizer tool and this allows you to take those photos, take the data after you've done your field survey and then process them, take all
04:43
that data from the photos and get the complex pieces like parking times and all the parking rules. And this is an example here of little segments that are being added and this is how you can get that extra detail. So the end result of this allows you to then get a map, an interactive
05:05
web map and we've got a really great demo at demo.curblr.org. You can filter by different hours when parking is available and I believe this one's downtown Portland and so this is a good example of how this tool and how CurbLR, the output of this, can make a really usable
05:22
format for monitoring parking assets and curb assets. So if you have any questions, we have a test cohort going right now with a beta test of the application. You can reach out to me or Emily at sharedstreets.io. Also check out our GitHub profile. We have the curb wheel there and available for testing. Thank you very much.