Planning Pool

To start off Tech Week, we’re going to talk about something that is near and dear to the hearts of many urban planners – Google Maps! Here’s a Top 10 list of great features in Google Maps:

1. Directions – You already know that you can get directions from A to B on Google Maps, but did you know that you can get those directions for transit or for bikes? Just click on “directions” on the top left hand corner – the train looking thing represents transit directions and the bike icon represents cycling directions. They aren’t perfect, but they are pretty good!
2. Street View – Street view is a great way to nab some precedent images or other images that show what the street looks like today. You can capture a screen shot of the street view and then import … Continue Reading
   

Bikewise is a website where users can report bike crashes, hazards, and thefts. The site is similar to SeeClickFix, EveryBlock, and PickupPal, some websites that we have written about before. The site, run by the Cascade Bicycle Club in Seattle, WA, aims to make biking safer and more fun. Bikewise wants users to add their own reports about crashes, hazards, and thefts. You can read more about the site on Streetsblog.

The site doesn’t seem to work in my Chrome browser, and there’s no information for Charlotte, NC, where I am now. But, Bikewise seems to be a great idea for “citizen journalism” and for the public to transparently see information about the city around them.

SeeClickFix.com is a new social networking service located in New Haven, Connecticut, that is using the wisdom of crowds to highlight municipal infrastructure problems.

The website is hoping to engage the community by providing tools that increase transparency and communication between residents, governments and organizations. Overall, SeeClickFix.com’s goal is to make it easier for residents to improve their community, using Google Maps.

The best thing about SeeClickFix.com is that it is so easy to use:
See – see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
Click – open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
Fix – publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
The website was started by a group of nerdy software and design entrepreneurs in New Haven who saw the British FixMyStreet.com … Continue Reading