My most recent report on Philadelphia Street Trash includes this hot spot analysis of Philly311 Illegal Dumping Service Requests. You can download the report here.
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Tag Archives: Litter GIS
Philadelphia’s 311 Data Shows That Philadelphians Hate Street Trash
Slide show on how we can use Philadelphia’s OpenDataPhilly 311 data to understand and solve our street trash problem.
PHL City Council – Environment Committee Testimony
Philadelphia’s City council Environment committee held a hearing on Wednesday, March 18, 2015. The hearing, chaired by Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown, had panels on Safety, Water, Air and trash Litter.
I had the privilege to testify on trash – litter. Here is pdf file on my testimony.
Philadelphia Litter Code Violation Notices by Council District
There were 33,213 litter code violation notices issued in 2013. Here’s a map that shows the number of litter code violations by the 10 City Council Districts.
Posted in GIS, Phila Trash
Tagged Litter GIS, Philadelphia litter, Philadelphia storm water
How to Map Phila Neighborhood Litter Code Violation Notices
I previously wrote about the Germantown 2013 litter code violation map. In this post, I want to provide a short how-to for this E Mt Airy 2013 Litter Code Violation Map so that others can produce similar maps for their neighborhoods.
GIS Requirements
I started using ESRI’s ArcMap after working with ESRI’s free ArcGIS Desktop Explorer for about a year. I love both products, with ArcMap providing the critical geoprocessing tools I needed to drill down into Philadelphia’s litter problem.
You’ll need a full GIS tool to be able to analyze Philadelphia litter data the way I have.
Litter Data Data Requirements
You need 3 data shapefiles to reproduce the E Mt Airy Litter code Violation map for your neighborhood. Here are the files with links tht you need:
- City Code Violation Notice Data Shapefile
- City Neighborhood Boundaries Shapefile
- City Street Centerlines Shapefile
Working with Code Violation Notice (CVN) Shapefile
The City’s CVN shapefile is pretty good size for my desktop PC at 450 thousand records. Once you load the CVN shapefile, I suggest that you open the CVN attribute table and select just 2013 CVNs for these litter codes:
- 10702 – Littering in Public
- 10703 – Litter in Receptacle
- 10705 – Litter swpt to gutter
- 107032 – Misuse of City Lit Bask
- 107041 – Sidewalk not litter free
- 107042 – Recpl not supplied
- 107141 – Premises not litter free
- 107142 – Recp not litter free
Once you have selected just the litter CVN for 2013, you save this data set as a new shapefile and use it as a layer for further analysis. Use the data > export option , give the export an understandable name and you now have just City wide 2013 litter CVNs.
Selecting 2013 Litter CVNs in your Neighborhood
You now want to select just those 2013 CVNs in your neighborhood. To do this, activate the neighborhoods layer you downloaded from Open Data Philly and select your neighborhood. One way you can do this is to click the Selection menu, choose Interactive Selection and go to desired neighborhood polygon and right click to select the desired polygon.
You now want to make a boundary layer for your desired neighborhood. Please note that you could add additional neighborhoods if you wanted. Once you have your neighborhood(s) selected, right click your City neighborhoods layer and select Data to export your neighborhood boundary as a separate layer. Be sure to name it with a useful neighborhood id so that you can retrieve it later.
Clip City 2013 Litter CVN Data to your Neighborhood Boundary
You now have a layer with just 2013 litter CVN data for the City and your desired neighborhood layer. To get just the litter CVNs in your neighborhood, you need to clip the City 2013 CVN layer with your neighborhood boundary.
Be sure to save your new clipped data layer with a recognizable name.
Map and Analysis
You now have a layer with just 2013 litter CVNs for your neighborhood. You are ready to produce your neighborhood map. You can use either one of the available basemaps or use the a clipped layer from the City’s centerline layer.
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Litter GIS, Philadelphia litter, Philadelphia storm water
Mapping Germantown Litter Code Violations
This post shows how the Philadelphia’s Code Violation Notice data can be used to identify local litter hot spots. In this example, I have selected the 2013 sidewalk and premise code violation notices within the Germantown Connections boundary.
Here is my ARCMap result:
Each of the 829 red dots represents a sidewalk or premise code violation notice issued in 2013.
I’ve been thinking about how local community development groups and City agencies could use this type of litter GIS data analysis to identify litter hot spots, monitor year-to-year litter changes (hopefully improvements) to effectively and focus attention in problem areas.
Mapping Philadelphia’s Litter Problem
Philadelphia’s Code Violation Notice data (link) provides the raw data for interested citizens, community groups and City officials to assess the litter problem across the City. The data can be overwhelming, but GIS tools like ESRI’s ARCMap make the data analysis challenge both fun and rewarding.
Click this link to download a pdf portolio of these map CVN_Portfolio1
Mapping Philadelphia Litter – Code Violations Data
Philadelphia released code notice violations (CNV) data in June, 2014 (here, here). In this post I want to show an example of what Philadelphia citizens can do with the City’s data to dig deeper into the causes – locations of Philadelphia’s litter problem.
First, let’s look at the map that I produced from the CNV data: a chloropleth map of 2013 CVN by Streets Department trash collection districts for 2 litter violations:
- 107041 – Sidewalk not litter free
- 107141 – Premise not litter free
There were 31,129 litter CVN, the number of violations by trash collection district vary from 0-50 (green areas) at the low end to a maximum of 1,527 (red areas). While this map doesn’t fully explain the City’s litter problem, it does show the pockets of litter free and litter prone areas. This map, coupled with other data on trash receptacle, housing stock conditions, bus stops, litter generating establishments can begin to focus attention on necessary remedial steps.
Philadelphia, under Mayor Nutter,has an excellent open data approach. Interested citizens working with the City’s open data will be able to take the next steps in tackling City litter by measuring the extent of the problem and conducing year-to-year assessments of progress.
Posted in GIS, Phila Trash
Tagged Green City Clean Waters, Litter GIS, Philadelphia litter