In a fit of excitement for my new venture, I spent more time than I should’ve today thinking about formatting and what content I want on my blog. Contrary to my last post and giving in to my personality, I decided that I need some sort of metric that I can use and analyze. Over the past year using dailymile.com has been really helpful and motivating. The website easily measures my distance, time, speed and calories burned for each month, week and day and displays the information is a user-friendly, Apple-esk format. At the end of last year the website even emailed me a year-end report that looked like a dashboard of an iPad:
Who knew I burned 27lbs, that beveled odometer did. As motivating as these statistics are, I need to have a more place based analysis for this blog and any of my new goals geographically related. The benefit of beginning this project unemployed is my ability to spend hours conceptualizing and then playing with ArcGIS to create infographics that will encourage me. Knowing myself and the fact that I don’t really like to bike the same place twice, I quickly thought of a goal: to bike through as much of the city and outlying areas as possible.
While working last year I attempted making maps that showed where I had been within the city’s limits. They were always half-assed, using some busted 1990 census tract map (why 2000 census tracts don’t show up in Google images search is beyond me) and then filling in each tract on my own perception of what neighborhood I thought it was and if had been there.
Realizing that I have a plethora of data for the Philadelphia region from my climate change studio I began to work creating a region-wide map that would include streets, city lines, water features and parks. Here is an example of the region-wide map that I designed:
That was the easy part. The harder part was to figure out a way to take cycling, usually measured in distance, and convert it into some sort of area measurement in order to say: “oh now I’ve biked through roughly 15% of the city”. Using my mad GIS skills, I decided that the simplest way to do this is to buffer a bicycle route. I somewhat arbitrarily decided that a buffer radius of roughly 400 feet would do well; mostly because that the average size a Center City block. Therefore, if I’ve biked down Spruce Street and then I also bike down Pine they will easily overlap.
So with this I decided to use the last bike ride I took a few days ago up the Schuylkill River path to the Wissahickon and then around the top of the valley and through Philadelphia University:
While this bike ride was quite invigorating because I tried to bike up what is probably a 45% slope, I’m going to focus on my new maps. So each time I go on a bike ride, not only will I give the stats, dailymile.com link I’ll also show the rout e as such:
I’m a sucker for consistency. While I heart GIS and analyzing my usage, the next map I feel like I’ll only be able to create every week. The following shows a 400’ buffer around my route, and while this is only one route’s buffer the idea is that it’ll show the progress I make, week after week:
Additionally, I’ll be able to track how much of every municipality I’ve bikes. For me that’s exciting. With this long as post ending, I’m still super thrilled. Hopefully I’ll have a bike ride to post in the coming days.
Happy trails.
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