The city of Davis website holds an interactive data map that provides in-depth information on the city’s traffic. Developed on a geographical information system (GIS), the new tool was designed by the city’s engineering technician, Matt Wolf, in an effort to provide the community a new source of convenience.
“It is a way for me to make available all the information we have in-house to the public,” Wolf said.
The map details information on traffic counts — number of vehicles that travel down a specific stretch of road — including areas of vehicle-, pedestrian- and bicycle-involved collisions from 2008 to 2010.
“Much of the data is organized annually, biennially or quadrennially based on the frequency at which we collect information on those locations,” Wolf said.
Also displaying locations for on-street bike parking, time-restricted parking and permit parking, the map serves to be a tool of versatility.
“A common concern among community members is the amount of speeding that may occur down residential streets,” Wolf said. “With this map, residents can now go to the speed survey layer and access all the numbers without the hassle of going through the city to find out.”
“Before this map, that data really wasn’t all that available to the public,” said Bruce Boyd, the GIS coordinator for the city. “Matt collected all that traffic data and converted it to a visual framework.”
The aesthetically pleasing framework has proved to be of use to not only community members but other city officials as well.
Deanne Machado, crime analyst of the Davis Police Department, said the GIS map compliments the city’s crime mapper.
“We use the data on that map to help us focus our areas of enforcement and thus improving safety in the city,” Machado said.
In conjunction with the service the map lends to traffic and transportation, it also has the option of serving community members on a personal level.
“Individuals can create their own maps with whatever data they want; for instance, plots of their favorite hiking spots,” Wolf said.
Any spatial information an individual would like to transform into visual form can be done through this site.
Let’s say you would like to find a common location among your teammates. You may plot the addresses of each member onto the map and it will calculate a point that is equidistant among each person.
“The map is very user-friendly and people don’t need any training to utilize the site,” Boyd said.
All traffic data is collected and maintained by the City of Davis Public Works Department.
The GIS map is a free service available to the public and can be found at cityofdavis.org/gis/traffic.cfm.
ANI UCAR can be reached at city@theaggie.org.
