Here's some more relevant information:

We attempted to log (scrape) both the raster AND the vector data behind plowNYC in the beginning hours of the blizzard that never was last week.  In both cases, grabbing data for the entire city (the only way to reasonably know if a street segment's plowed status had changed over time) meant grabbing 10s of Megabytes of information from the city's servers with each pass.

The JSON feed that powers Plow Tracker (and thus clearstreets.org) is a mere 40 KB, and contains real-time location data for all of the city's plows.  A similar feed is all we would need to do some great analysis on the plow operation, and to build contextual or neighborhood-level information products that serve needs the plowNYC does not.     

-Chris

<City_of_Chicago____Plow_Tracker.png>

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 11:11 PM, Andrew Rasiej <[address removed]> wrote:

Thanks Chris.

This is what I was afraid of finding out.

I will inquire with City Hall about this.

Stay tuned.

Andrew

On Feb 3, 2015, at 11:06 PM, Chris Whong <[address removed]> wrote:

Andrew,

A project *exactly* like clearstreets would not be possible, because we do not have real-time plow vehicle location data available in New York City.  As Joel noted, we do have PlowNYC, which will tell you when and where plows were, but not exactly where they are.  

Clearstreets is scraping real-time vehicle locations from Chicago's plow tracker, so the city isn't exactly "opening" the data.  However, scrape-able government data is better than no government data. Clearstreets is also logging and sharing a massive amount of historical data that Chicago is presumably not publishing.  

We should encourage the city to open an API for real-time plow locations AND publish historical plow data.  

-Chris

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 10:07 PM, Joel Natividad <[address removed]> wrote:

Hi Andrew,

The City has PlowNYC at http://maps.nyc.gov/snow/#.

And there was a very long thread on the very topic last week - https://groups.google.com/a/betanyc.us/forum/#!topic/nyc-opendata-wg/94wS3tDKD90

TLDR: The City will add the snow-plow data to the data portal so the community doesn't have to scrape it :)

Best,

Joel

--

Joel Natividad

[masked]

@jqnatividad

Ontodia, Inc.

137 Varick Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10013

pediacities.com * nycpedia.com

On Tue, Feb 3, 2015 at 9:43 PM, Andrew Rasiej <[address removed]> wrote:

Question:

Does anyone know if a similar project like http://clearstreets.org is in the works for NYC?

Seems like a great example of civic tech applied after the city opens up data

See: http://chicago.suntimes.com/chicago-politics/7/71/341993/snowplows-hit-ald-burkes-street-five-times

Thanks,

Andrew

@Rasiej
Founder Personal Democracy Media

Founder/CEO Civic Hall
Senior Technology Advisor Sunlight Foundation
Chairman NY Tech Meetup.

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