Welcome to NYC School of Data — a community conference that demystifies the policies and practices around open data, technology, and service design. This year’s conference kicks off NYC’s Open Data Week & features 30+ sessions organized by NYC’s civic technology, data, and design community! Our conversations & workshops will feed your mind and empower you to improve your neighborhood.
To attend, you need to purchase tickets via eventbrite. Venue is accessible and content is all ages friendly! If you have accessibility questions or needs, please email us at < schoolofdata@beta.nyc >.
If you can’t join us in person, tune into the main stage via zoom < schoolofdata.nyc/live >. Follow the conversation #nycSOdata on twitter.
The Department of Transportation (DOT)’s Open Streets program is a form of tactical urbanism where previously car-dedicated streets are repurposed into pedestrian only spaces. One way to address any inequities in the program is resourcing existing open streets, with funding, programmatic support, full-time staffers like community organizers, infrastructure, and more. Using NYC’s vast array of open data, specifically about open streets, NYCHA, LinkNYC, traffic, and vision zero, we created a priority metric to identify which of DOT’s existing open streets are among the most deserving for funding/resourcing (similar to “priority A” designations).
Our session will show participants how to create a similar street hierarchy: we created this metric using open data on ArcGIS, but can be easily replicated on QGIS and other free software. This GIS priority metric serves as a model that can be adapted to incorporate different types of data. We want to emphasize that the open street priority metric is designed to be adaptable and reflexive according to changing social, environmental, and political conditions. As strong proponents of participatory research and critical data, we’d love to help participants understand some of the difficulties we encountered and how to troubleshoot them. We’d also present the research we collected, and our results. Specifically, our top three open streets we recommend prioritizing were (1) Murray Hill’s Barton Avenue (due to proximity to vision zero traffic intersections & potential to expand into the LIRR plaza nearby), (2) East Harlem’s East 119th Street (due to proximity to PS 112 and a GreenThumb community garden), and (3) Mott Haven’s Alexander Avenue (due to proximity to four NYCHA complexes).
