Monday, May 23, 2011
Budget Share Widget
Just added a new widget, over there->, that allows you to enter a sum of money and select either HCDE or Chattanooga to see what percent of budget that figure represents. Testing it at this point with- FY10 total for Hamilton County Department of Education = $358,995,245 and City Of Chattanooga passes budget total for FY11 = $185,188,000. I might add more choices later. I did this last week for the HCDE budget but added the City choice today inspired by Chattarati's interactive City budget tool. The idea was to have this handy for when consuming news stories and quickly being able to see how big the figure du jour represents in the big picture.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Road Closure Closure
A bit late for the update, but all dots on the map are green. I think this type of mapping effort is a good idea and the only way to quickly map the majority of blocked roads in our area is for a few dozen people to report them. (Thank you to those of you who submitted info and updates and a huge thanks to @dryan for porting the map over to openchattanooga and adding a submission form.) I am sure a lot of us experienced the same sort of thing on that Wednesday, we were trying to get home and continued to be met by trees and lines down. I had to park and walk as our neighborhood was blocked off from every direction several trees deep at each block. (No complaints though as most of the houses were not damaged.) Then the driving chaos started and continued for days.* People were driving faster and more carelessly than usual and through unfamiliar neighborhoods to boot.**
We are looking in to ways to make the map better in case we need to use it again in the future. I am sure this type of model would work well for coordination of volunteer efforts, both in 'normal' times as well as in times of crisis. If so, we, as a community, only have to decide that it is.
* Four-way stop people, jeez!
** I highly recommend looking at the TDOT Traffic History Fusion app. Zoom in to your neighborhood or to a place where a road was blocked near you. Then click on a dot to see average daily traffic flow through that point. For quite a few locations on the closure map, there were traffic flow stations showing an average daily flow of thousands of cars. Even with a dip in the average amount of traffic, a lot of residential areas saw huge increases in traffic overflowing off of these major roads like Shallowford and Germantown.
We are looking in to ways to make the map better in case we need to use it again in the future. I am sure this type of model would work well for coordination of volunteer efforts, both in 'normal' times as well as in times of crisis. If so, we, as a community, only have to decide that it is.
* Four-way stop people, jeez!
** I highly recommend looking at the TDOT Traffic History Fusion app. Zoom in to your neighborhood or to a place where a road was blocked near you. Then click on a dot to see average daily traffic flow through that point. For quite a few locations on the closure map, there were traffic flow stations showing an average daily flow of thousands of cars. Even with a dip in the average amount of traffic, a lot of residential areas saw huge increases in traffic overflowing off of these major roads like Shallowford and Germantown.
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