DVAEYC IREG Meeting 2 June 2010 Tamara Manik-Perlman, Azavea (formerly Avencia) CommonSpace: A Shared Transitspace Collaboration Platform

William Penn Foundation Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia NPower PA Azavea (formerly Avencia) Partners

Vision

 Provide consumers with tools to make choices that support local living economies  Promote sustainable transit  Support neighborhood corridor economic development  Promote Philadelphia as a sustainable city Project Goals

1.Sustainable transit visualization 2.Destination discovery on a map, aggregated from curated web sources 3.Real-time collaboration CommonSpace Features

See and search where you can go by walking, biking & public transit. 1.Transit Visualization

Discover events, “local treasures” & sustainable businesses from a variety of curated sources. 2. Destination Discovery

Collaborate on a shared map to find and choose destinations at a convenient distance from everyone in a group. 3. Collaboration

 Planning what to do tonight with your friends who are online at the same time  Planning a weekend adventure over the course of a week  Planning a multi-stop shopping trip  Finding a location for a house based on work, school, and other locations  Publishing an itinerary online, e.g. events at a multi-day event How could this be used?

Walkthrough

User Narrative I want to go out and find a fun activity within walking distance. I invite a friend to come with me, and we find somewhere to eat that is located conveniently for both of us.

Demonstration

Data & Technology

 Open-source multi-modal trip planner  Uses Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm  Developed by Brandon Martin-Anderson Graphserver

Transitspace Calculation Methodology 1.Gather data 2.Build graphs 3.Generate shortest path tree 4.Calculate contour raster 5.Convert raster to three-band bitmap

 Street network OpenStreetMap (XML)  DEM USGS NED  Transit data Google’s General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) 1. Gather Data

 Import data into Graphserver  Run a utility to create a network for each transit method; include additional parameters such as directionality or weighting i.Walking ii.Biking iii.Mass Transit 2. Build Graphs + + i. ii. iii.

 Select a starting point and a transit method  Traverse the appropriate graph  Assign a time distance to each vertex on the network 3. Generate Shortest Path Tree Source: Brandon Martin-Anderson

 Using values of vertices, calculate a contour map of travel times  Output result as a raster 4. Calculate Contour Raster Source: Brandon Martin-Anderson

 Convert single-band raster to a three-band (RGB) bitmap 5. Convert to Bitmap

Transitspace Visualization Source: Brandon Martin-Anderson 1.Overlay the transitspace bitmap on the map 2.Move the slider to control travel time 3.Translate travel time to a color value 4.Display transitspace: visualization is controlled by a Flex image filter, which displays only those values below a given color value threshold

Search Area Server Geoprocessing 1.Move the slider to control travel time 2.Reclass the raster into binary values: 1 for values below the selected time, 0 for those above 3.Convert cells = 1 to a vector polygon with a unique ID 4.Calculate search area, or commonspace, as the intersection of one or more transitspace polygons

Feed Search Feeds come in many types  Event listings (API)  Curated blogs (GeoRSS)  Static databases of destinations (API) CommonSpace calls web services differently depending on their requirements  Point-in-polygon search  Pass in an extent, filter returned results by the search area

Questions? Tamara Manik-Perlman, Azavea DVAEYC IREG Meeting 2 June 2010

We do other work too…

Transitspace Visualization 1.Overlay the transitspace bitmap on the map 2.Move the slider to control travel time 3.Translate travel time to a color value 4.Display transitspace: visualization is controlled by a Flex image filter, which displays only those values below a given color value threshold + = +