It has been a long road with many volunteer hours but we are finally happy to announce our first regional mapping project launch. First, we need to note a few things (scroll down and just start clicking links if you want).
Firstly what are we doing at Streets are for People? Our goal is to generate creative ideas for sustainable urban planning in St. John’s and the wider metropolitan area. We aren’t re-writing the book; We are simply looking at other global and national success stories, and applying that ethos here around the North East Avalon. The way we will do that is via creating and sharing compelling maps and data analysis. There are many amazing advocate groups in and around St. John’s, but the data behind their work is often less visible. We want to change that, and now you see how we can.
Right now, there are very few single sources of any regional infrastructure or demographic data, except provincial highway / crown lands data and national initiatives that just use broad analysis to look at the nation as a whole. That doesn’t help tell people here understand our built environment.
We are going to change that and it starts with V0.8 of our
St. John’s Metro Mobility Infrastructure map.
Our GIS Database page goes into more detail, but here is the short of it. We want a single location for someone to analyze and explore our built environment for the North East Avalon, also known as the St. John’s Census Metropolitan Area by Statistics Canada, or the SJ-CMA.
Since this area is made up of 14 different communities ranging as small as Bauline to as large as St. John’s, the data sharing and commonality between them is non-existent. If someone wants to compare street make up, transit access, zoning, speed limits etc, they will have a very hard time; We would know, as it is, after-all, our source data.
So what does version 0.8 contain? This is just the first portion of this project but it contains data about sidewalks, vehicle lanes, vehicle parking, vehicle parking status (mostly around St. John’s), and street aligned active transportation space. Our current internal database contains a lot more data, but not all of it is ready for the spotlight just yet.
We are aiming to launch v0.9 before the year is out, which will add zoning data, fill in other active transit transportation space, transit user data from Statistics Canada, Metrobus’ complete system map with accessibility data, street speed limits, and correct some errors that are in v0.8. We will also continue our posts that dive a little deeper into these maps core data.
We might hear you say “people love a great interactive map, but what else will you be doing?” Great question. We will continue doing posts regarding our built environment. We will still be working on expanding our core mapping data and preparing different exciting mapping projects. We will also do deeper analysis of the data you will find in our maps to answer questions like:
- How many free parking spaces are in St. John’s vs other communities?
- How many lane-km of road space are in St. Johns?
- How often do buses go to the areas with the highest and lowest riderships?
- How affordable are different parts of the town for the median income?
- Where are the most fiscally positive neighbourhoods vs the least?
Either way, we are VERY excited to share this first step of many with you, so that you can join our conversation about fiscally, environmentally, and socially sustainable urban planning for our region.
We hope you join us in exploring our built environment through mapping, and data analysis.
We have already published some interactive maps to help explain our built environment on the North East Avalon region. Two of these were for Happy City which you can find in our page dedicated to that project. This is the most comprehensive accessibility mapping project that has been done to date (that we can find). Expect more partnerships in the future.
Finally, this project would not be possible without the work of the members on the team page plus several others. Without the team acquiring core data, processing that data, making connections with municipalities, setting up and running the website and back-end software, generating the mapping, making the mapping viewable, and making media posts, this would not be possible. This type of work takes a team. Also, without the support of friends, family, and the public who know about our work so far, we would have no reason to do this. We are doing this because the Streets are for People and those people need data to make informed decisions about how we design those streets.
streetsafp.ca 