Here’s a quick trash photo survey of N 9th and Nobel Streets that I took on Saturday, January 3rd. This corner is a little less than 1 mile from City Hall.
1. Map of N 9th & Noble Streets
2. Illegal Dumping and Trash Filled Inlet
3. Trash Along N 9th Street
4. Trash Along Noble Street
Posted in Phila Trash
Tagged Green City Clean Waters, Illegal Dumping, Philadelphia litter
Posted in General
Tagged Green City Clean Waters, Philadelphia litter, Philadelphia storm water, plastic bags
We have a serious plastic stormwater trash problem that is hurting our local creeks, Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers as well as the Atlantic Ocean. This photo gallery shows my 10/13/14 trash survey along the West Deptford, NJ Delaware River bank. (PDF here)
Pennsylvania and New Jersey litter gets washed into local creeks during rain storms and makes its way down stream to the Delaware where it gets moved around by wind and tide. Some gets caught on W Deptford’s river shoreline.
Street and stormwater litter conditions vary across the City, with the TTF and Cobbs Creeks having the worst creek trash problems while the Pennypack and Wissahickon Creeks having less creek trash.
This map, prepared with ESRI’s ArcMap, shows the incidence of 2013 litter Code Violation Notices for the 5 small creek watersheds in Philadelphia.
Clearly, the Tacony-Frankford and Cobbs Creek watersheds have much more serious litter conditions than than the Wissahickon and Pennypack Creek watersheds.
The Tacony-Frankford Creek has a major stormwater trash problem, as discussed here, here and here.
In this post, I want to show how to map watershed boundaries, Philadelphia City Council District Boundaries and litter Code Violation Notice data to show the geographic relationships between chronic litter areas, stormwater flow and creek trash.
Here is my map:
I made this map using ESRI’s ArcMap and Philadelphia’s open Code Violation Notice data. There were 6,258 litter code violations in the Philadelphia portion of the TTF Watershed. The Tacony Creek Park, highlighted in data green in the map, receives a large load of stormwater litter that gets caught along the banks and in vegetation along the banks.
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
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:
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:
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
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.
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
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:
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