MySidewalk empowers cities to do more with their data
A single tool for goal-tracking and geospatial analysis powered by GL JS
MySidewalk is changing how local governments use data, track progress, and share results. Analysts leverage mySidewalk’s geoanalytics engine to visualize data at any level of geography and chart progress with custom dashboards. Customer Experience Manager Jennifer Funk, CTO Matt Barr, and Marketing Manager Lauren Nguyen, of mySidewalk, told us how the tools they’ve built on our stack are saving cities time and improving life for local communities.
What was the inspiration for mySidewalk dashboards?
There is no shortage of data in any city. What’s missing is an easy way to identify areas of focus, turn insight into action, and ultimately share performance results. We developed mySidewalk dashboards to make data more accessible, pinpoint places of need and progress, and help prioritize projects so analysts can track improvement (or lack of it) not only citywide, but in every pocket of the community.
You’ve changed map providers several times. How have your needs changed, and why make the switch to Mapbox GL JS?
It was clear that the experience for our developers and end users would be best with GL JS because of the functionality, performance, visual appeal, and ongoing support of the open source community.
With Mapbox, we have improved client-side rendering, substantially fewer connections and lower bandwidth between web clients and our own servers, and incredible new dynamic cartographic options. And our end users get enhanced navigation and control over the viewport of the map. Changing the angle and pitch or supporting non-integral zooms might seem like vanity features, but they’re actually huge when trying to publish an engaging narrative using geo data.
How do your maps help cities understand the data they have? Do you have stories you can share?
We believe it’s impossible to try and understand any indicator of progress without applying a geospatial lens.
We make it possible for cities to auto-generate maps and charts that show sentiment analysis, operational indicators, census data, and more. We also make it possible to display by any boundary: police districts, political districts, neighborhoods, planning areas, census geographies, and even hand-drawn or uploaded shapes.
We recently worked with the City of Kansas City, Missouri to build a dashboard that breaks down citizen satisfaction of neighborhood sidewalks by ZIP code, council district, and neighborhood. In the past, the City was only able to look at significant year-over-year change at the citywide level, now they can monitor at any level of geography with statistical significance and publish reports providing access and transparency for citizens themselves.
Julie Steenson, Deputy Performance Officer at the City of Kansas City, MO describes the benefit this way: “The amount of effort it takes to analyze existing data means that we are limited in our ability to deliver insights to the organization and community… mySidewalk will help us get more data-driven insights to more people, and save time and resources in the process.”
For example, the map below shows that residents in zip code 64127 are much less satisfied with their sidewalks than residents in other zip codes. There are a number of possible explanations, but this information can be used almost like a “wayfinding” tool, pointing cities in the right direction for asking questions, spurring discussion, and conducting further analyses.
What’s on the horizon? How do you plan to improve the dashboard?
We’re really just getting warmed up. In the immediate future, we want to enable visualizations based on data attributes tied to geometries besides polygons — street segments color coded by traffic/accidents; points sized or colored based on tax abatements; and heat maps.
Performance and scalability are always high on the list, and we’ll be looking at ways to keep the experience smooth on low bandwidth and smaller screen devices. We also want to make it easy for users to include parts of their analyses and reports in other content — exports and embedding are going to be important features for us.
We’re helping global cities use data to tackle their most pressing issues. Meet us at Smart Cities Week in DC, Oct 3–5 to learn more or reach out to our sales team about building with our tools.
