Looks like Google Maps just rolled out a panning-between-photos-of-the-same-object navigation utility for the geo-tagged user photos that Street View now incorporates, in a manner similar to Microsoft's Photosynth but all in-browser.
There's great news on the Government Transparency front: The city of Pittsburgh has collected and collated all of it's public planning data into one big document, for easy reference. They call it PGHSNAP, short for Pittsburgh Sector and Neighborhood Asset Profiles/Action Planning.
There's only one problem! It's a eight hundred page document, mostly maps, and all of those maps are at incredibly low resolution. Most of the maps, despite being saved in a file format perfectly able to handle high-density vector data, are vector files saved as low resolution images and pasted in.
Exhibit A: the Open Space and Parks Map
Looks OK, right? Here's what happens when you zoom into the PDF:
It's a pixel disaster the likes of which I haven't seen since the PDFs the Port Authority puts out. True, slightly higher resolution maps exist for each specific neighborhood, but you don't hurt anybody's pixels by making the city-wide map, you know, readable too.
Here's the deal, City, in case you never got the memo:
It's OK to produce detailed, data-rich documents. This is the Internet Age, we can handle it. And for god's sake, don't put text in images without extracting it into something searchable. I wouldn't have found this whole page of blight maps via search, even thought that's text right there:
And I guess this would actually be pretty interesting data, if I could zoom in on the maps at all without getting a good idea of the number of Vacant Parcels in Pixelville:
And as for PGHSNAP's sister Project, PGHGIS, I'll like you better when you don't have such intersting rendering-issues, and are a little more navigable:
This isn't transparency in government quite yet- its more of a hazy translucence, like windows that have newspaper taped over them.
I'd love to find some real life examples of such windows, but the blight maps are too pixilated for me to see.
Allegheny County Executive Dan Onorato does not like property reassessment one bit, which is bad because property reassessment is part of his job description.
Once upon a time, governments derived much of their revenue from property taxes, but in America income tax has slowly taken the lead. For the most part, American property tax dollars are the primary means by which local services (schools, fire protection, police, sanitation, etc.) are paid for. In Pennsylvania specifically, it is used primarily for supporting local school districts.
The Uniformity Clause in the State constitution allows different counties to tax properties differently, but requires that within any one county the tax is done in a uniform way. This seems like it would work simply in the case of property: just set the tax to be a blanket percentage of the property value of each property in the county. Uniformity? Absolutely.
The problem: how do you actually determine the value of a particular property in the county, and how often do you reassess that number?
Until the late eighties, the state required that every county do a full reassessment annually. In Allegheny county's case, this was done generally by looking at sales prices of properties in different areas, and using those to push the "assessed value" of the surrounding properties up or down a blanket percentage. That is to say, if the market in, say, Edgewood went up two percent over last year, the properties in Edgewood would all be reassessed two percent upwards.
When a given area's assessed value started getting out of whack with its real value, the county would do a "real" assessment again.
All through the nineties, various suits plagued the County over this practice, since the areas that got reassessed "for real" got reassessed heftily upwards 85% of the time, creating disparities in assessed value vs. real value between areas that were targeted for reassessment and areas that were simply recomputed.
Finally, thanks to a court order, in 2002 a county-wide reassessment was performed. Soon after, Dan Onorato was elected County Executive. He put a freeze on reassessments, choosing instead to regard 2002 as a "base year" and simply collect property tax based on every properties 2002 value. Since all properties were "really" reassessed in 2002, this would seem to satisfy the Uniformity Clause.
Not so fast, Dan.
The state law about using "base years" to compute property taxes does not require periodic reassessment at all. 2002's data can be (and has been) used indefinitely to compute Allegheny County's taxable property values. This creates its own set of disparities, as areas where property values have gone down (and, consequentially, the real net worth those area's residents have has gone down too) are now being overtaxed, while areas where property prices have risen are being undertaxed.
Three separate complaints have made their way all the way to the state supreme court, which ruled (pdf link) against the county's current practice and demanded an immediate reassessment. It's a pretty epic ruling, well researched and written, with a great introductory quote from a 1909 court decision:
“Controversies growing out of the assessment and collection of taxes are as old as civilization. To question the assessment, to doubt the levy, and to delay the collector may be classed among those inalienable rights of mankind not guaranteed by any Constitution, but very generally asserted under the law of human nature.”
Essentially, the court found that by indefinitely re-using 2002's numbers, the county was levying taxes in a sufficiently non-uniform manner as to be unconstitutional, specifically that "The Allegheny County scheme, which permits a single base-year assessment to be used indefinitely, has resulted in significant disparities in the ratio of assessed value to current actual value in Allegheny County."
Onarato, though, will have none of it. Though there is clear wording in the decision telling the county to reassess and instructing the lower court to see that through, the County Executive (and as of October 2009, candidate for Governor) had made it clear that he will not be carrying out such an assessment, and plans as Governor to address the situation at a statewide level.
Now, City Squid understands why the early Aughts were a time where reassessing property value seemed like a bad idea. The real estate market was clearly bubbling, and to let county income be based on such a volatile measure is foolish at best. But to cling to 2002's numbers indefinitely is equally foolish. We can see why, though: when the reckoning comes, and assessed value finally catches up to real value, heads will most certainly roll, either because the population feels slighted for having been overtaxed for so long, or mad as hell that their taxes just got hiked so high.
Our thought: better in the long run though to be fair and accurate and unpopular, than willfully ignorant of your own tax base's value.
On a cold winter day, nothing warms the heart like a half-full Port Authority bus pulling up to your stop, its open doors pouring warmth onto the street like Bacchanalian wine. And nothing curdles the heart more than that same bus, full, zooming past, splattering your pants with oily road-slush. Twenty years hence, such a dichotomy might be a thing of the past.
Today, Carnegie Mellon, and specifically the Smart Growth Club, a student initiative based in the Heinz Business School, hosted a panel on "Transportation and Economic Expansion in Pittsburgh", looking at how transportation might grow and change in the next twenty years. The Traffic21 Initiative also helped host.
The panelists were a who's who of the public, private, local, civic, county, and state organizations involved in transport decisions in the city, moderated by a man who has served, over his career, in all of those catagories: Allen Kukovich, currently the Director of the Power of 32 Regional Visioning Project and a former PA State Senator.
The panel was an hour and a half long, and the time was divided roughly thus: fifteen minutes of general introduction, thirty minutes of short introductory comments from the panelists, thirty minutes of the moderator directing audience questions (written on index cards) to various panelists, with just a hint of back-and-forth between them, and then fifteen minutes of closing comments from the panelists.
Almost all the panelists opened by bashing the "purgatory" of low-density, high car-use suburbia, a big initial "we don't want that" caveat. Further talk trended towards the need to fix and creatively reuse the systems and infrastructure already in existence before talking of huge new projects. As Bill Peduto put it, "We need to fix city roadways up to the era of Duran Duran, at least."
Steve Bland mentioned a few exciting Port Authority upgrades, especially the introduction of Smart Cards, electronic bus passes that would be easier for consumers to use, harder to fake, and provide PAT with much more data on their riders.
He also mentioned the need to get real-time data to riders. According to market surveys, he said, if a person waiting for a late bus still knows how soon it will be arriving (is it two minutes late? or ten minutes late?), they are twice as likely to perceive the system as being "on time", regardless of how off-schedule it is.
(Very recently, the Port Authority actually opened up all of its scheduling and route data in Google's Transit Feed Specification, though with a pretty restrictive license that disallows modification and warns that a licensing fee might one day be instituted. This begs the question: why is a public utility's data not completely open and free to its public?)
Finally, he discussed ways in which the bus system (which contains 90% of PAT's overall ridership) could become more train-like, with bus terminals and stops that were not only efficient, but beautiful, appropriate, and which felt like real places integrated into their respective neighborhoods.
Steven Roberts had a lot to say that reinforced the above points, and added his own thoughts regarding cycling. He seemed like he had a lot more to say, seeing as he is the city's Transport Planner, but time was pretty limited and much of that talk was curtailed to a couple of buzzwords, most notably Livable Communities, Slow Streets, and Complete Systems (rather than Complete Streets).
The other two panelists got a bit edged-out of the panel-time (and my notes), but Sustainable Pittsburgh's Court Gould did make one striking point during his brief mic-time: there is no need to "balance economic development and transportation development. We can predicate economy on transport."
In all, it was a pretty optimistic panel. It looks like there are quite a few smart people thinking very hard about Pittsburgh's transport opportunities as time moves on. They did, though, all seem to be waiting for the money to come in for new projects and ideas, either from the federal government, from a restructure of local monies, or from public-private partnerships that have yet to materialize. It makes one wonder if there are ways that the money currently being spent could be spent in more interesting or efficient ways.
City Squid likes to think about these problems.
A few easy-to-implement ideas that the panel missed:
Posted, relevant schedules at every stop. This can be done today- many bus shelters are actually paid for by advertising companies, but have areas where such schedules can be posted inside the shelter.
Downloadable and printable schedules that are slightly more bespoke than currently available (pdf link), letting one print out, for example, a schedule of all of the busses that pass through a specific stop, with the relevant junction-points further afield calculated and specified.
Bus schedule and route data made available online- in an open format.
Serious development to make that data available via the mobile web, via cell phone txt queries, and with a sensible web interface.
And a few ideas that are a bit harder, that the panel did cover:
GPS transceivers on every bus. Real time scheduling corrections and shifts. Better metrics on lateness, clumping, etc. Data-driven schedule changes.
Live feedback at bus stops.
Electronic fares and passes.
The better rider data generated by the above ideas rolled back into route and schedule planning.
One can only hope that these ideas get implemented, and implemented well.
A final thought, the one that Bill Peduto chose to end on:
The city has, currently, a pretty-much-unused rail line that from Lawrenceville past Carnegie Mellon and down to the Monongahela river. It is ripe to be transformed into a commuter rail, one that could be the beginning of a region-wide rail system serving from Washington to Meadville. This line's right-of-way is so perfect for intra-city transport that its existence is near-miraculous to us, as we have forgotten that the region was built around rail lines, not the other way around.
What if all we had was photographs? What would future people guess our world was like? And if they had millions of photographs to search through? Billions? What would they come to understand about 2010 if they had just a photographic record?
Times Square, New York City is not the most photographed place in the world, according to a study of all 35 million geotagged photographs on Flickr, but it is in the top hundred. Does that make it an important, historical place?
Digital cameras have outsold film cameras for nearly a decade, and every year they get lighter, smaller, and able to hold more photographs. People take more pictures with them, and more of those pictures get shared with the general public on Flickr, Facebook, and other social platforms. Times Square, then, will only become more photographed as time goes on, and as time goes on more and more of that photography will enter the near-public record, on Facebook, Flickr, and other social sites (not to mention whatever ends up part of Homeland Security databases, etc). What sort of world will all that data show off?
We already have such a photographic record, and I think we can start answering those questions.
This photographic record is getting more metadata-rich too. Metadata is data about data- in the case of photographs, things like the time and day the photo was taken, the latitude and longitude of the camera, who took the picture, what the light was like that day, and a host of other things.
As cellular phones and other devices incorporate better and better digital cameras, and as stand-alone cameras add better and better features, digital capture devices can add more and more metadata to those photographs, from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to specific GPS geo-tagging.
As recently as two years ago, Microsoft and the University of Washington began taking advantage of all this tagged and coded photo-data to build Photosynth, a software package that generates three dimensional models of heavily-photographed areas, as well as stitched-together continuous images of that object. This is their demo video, from 2008, showing their model of St. Peter's Basilica:
It's a pretty neat demo, but it is also a demo of a highly photographed space, on the order of Times Square or the Eiffel Tower. Sitka, Alaska, on the other hand, probably doesn't get photographed nearly as often, and would not have made the most interesting of demos.
It may sound obvious, but there are a couple of reasons for this. Sitka is remote: it's a major fishing port, and a stopover for Alaskan tourism, but not an international trade center nor an airline hub. Not to be cruel, but Sitka is less important to the vast majority of travelers than the commercial spectacle of Times Square.
One may note from the video above that so photographed is St. Peter's Basilica that the video-authors can actually show the progression of an event registration just by browsing deeper into the future-end of the time-scale of the photos taken and seeing volunteers arrive, chairs unfold, and up spring tables.
If the photographs taken of a place can be imagined as a hyper-rectangular volume populated with photograph points set in space, (as they are in the above video) and perhaps colored by time (red is the past, blue is the future, a feature not in the video), but limited to an hour or a day or so, then one can see that Times Square would be a virtual sea of reference-frames, with thousands and thousands of data-points, many of them overlapping spatially, but splayed across time (implying that there are certainiconicshotsthateveryonewantstocapture). But not all places in the world could boast such a crowded ocean of data.
The photograph of a woman standing in front of Sitka National Forest has no such overlapping photography. Instead, its volume would show something more like a wandering line through space and time, with just a few photo-points demarking its passage. From the photostream the picture is part of, one can see that it is part of a series of vacation photos, a single point in a long, narrow tunnel of personal experience, nowhere near as data-rich as an intersection like Times Square or a landmark like the Basilica.
If one extended the time-frame of the Sitka National Forest volume to a week or so, one might come upon a few dozen more such tunnels-through-space-time, whose various photo-points might reveal what people in general find interesting at the site (the totem pole, apparently).
Comparing these three space-time volumes (Sitka, Times Square, and St. Peter's Basilica), one notes that, beyond the data conveyed by the photographs, there is meta-data that can be derived from photographic density. Density, in this case, is almost shorthand for interestingness or famousness. The thought might be I was here at this important thing, and that makes me a little important too. Let me record this temporal-spacial meeting.
If one was mining this photographic data for, say, an idea of the number of people who were at a rally, or what might have happened during a riot, then density of photodata around that event is a key factor. Places that are heavily photographed, in effect, can be more accurately surveilled -- the gaps in the record are correspondingly smaller.
So when historically important events happen at famous or crowded locations, this meta-data composed out of many different photographic references becomes magnified, sometimes overwhelming the photographic data itself. An act can appear innocent or incredibly guilty, depending on exactly how it was captured on film. If a man spends five minutes tying his shoes, is he really clumsy, or is he watching someone? The photographic record can save or damn him.
The Kennedy Assassination, for example, has been so scrutinized that every single frame of the famous Zapruder Film has been carefully scanned and preserved, and various conspiracy theories have arisen not based on what was in that series of 18.3 photographs/second, but on what might have happened between frames and whether or not the between-frame events make sense. The questions arise not because of the data itself, but because it is not dense enough.To use a more computer-era phrase, the Zapruder Film needed a higher capture and refresh rate. In general, history would be better understood if data on Dealey Plaza refreshed faster for those key seconds (The Watchmen movie used this data paucity to great effect (at 2:43)).
In a way, one can think of photo-density as bandwidth: data-transfer between the real world and the nebulous digital record that shadows it. The Zapruder film is like a bad dial-up connection: there is a lot of noise mixed in with all that signal. Times Square, on the other hand, is like broadband- a veritable river of data. Sitka would be like a satellite phone: often off, but data-heavy when in use.
But does photo-density actually improve surveillance? I would argue that it doesn't. If photo-dense places are people-dense places, then there are a vast number of crimes, from murder to rape to robbery, that simply would not be captured in the public photo record, as they are not crimes one commits around big crowds of people.
My guess is that the photo-density in the real world is only going to increase as time goes on, and that the higher it goes, the more and more metadata we will figure out how to draw from it. The number of places data-rich enough to be accurately and usefully modeled in both space and time will only go up. The algorithms for enmeshing all this photo-data and recognizing real-world objects within it will only get better. The willingness of people to add their own photographic data to the general data will go up (though whether this is out of a newfound cultural sense of the commons or because a form online somewhere is set up as an opt-out rather than opt-in remains to be seen).
In the future, Times Square may still be highly photographed in the public record. But the rest of the tail of that graph will have seriously caught up.
I doubt that this spread of photo-density to more places will do much to improve security, capture more criminals, or make huge discoveries about human interaction.
No- I think that its ultimate contributions will arrive in the same ad-hoc way that its data does- small, interesting, strange patterns that careful, persistent data-mining will make quite clear.
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