SANDAG Senior Research Analyst Mike Calandra sent us some traffic data updates for our Data As a Public Good report. I’m always thrilled when I get to communicate directly with agency analysts, and having them write to me is like an early Christmas. In our Data as a Public Good report several interviewees reported that they had difficulty getting traffic data from SANDAG, and the SANDAG website only publishes traffic count data as a PDF or an interactive map. However, SANDAG was very responsive to my Public Records Act Request for the traffic counts in a structured format, and we’ve got the response from that request in our repository, so we’ve updated the report to reflect this more recent experience, and here are some other resources that Mike mentioned. SANDAG is current in the process of updating their traffic count reports and replacing them with a Regional Count Database. The application will be an interactive map with a focus on arterial streets. CalTRANS, through their PEMS application, reports counts for freeways. PEMS also has about 10 years of data for many other traffic metrics, such as collisions. Every 10 years, SANDAG does a survey of county residents about travel. The last one was conducted in 2006. I haven’t read the report in enough detail to assess the quality of the statistics, but I’m already really impressed with the design and methodology – see “Cognitive Interview” appendix on page 132 for a lesson on how to do a survey right. If the survey company, NUSTATS, put as much work into statistics that they did in designing the survey, this report has the best data it would be possible to get. Mike sent a few other links that I knew existed, but hadn’t seen, such as these links to forecasts:

I’m spending the morning at Qualcomm for the Python Data Analysis Workshop, run by Dave Cook of the San Diego Python User group. I’m presenting about using Python to analyze crime and census data. If you like pretty pictures, the presentation has plenty of them:

Analyzing Crime and Census Data Presentation.

Here is a youtube channel of videos about data analysis. I’ve only seen a few of them, but they seem like an excellent introduction to data mining, hypothesis generation, prediction and other techniques. http://www.youtube.com/user/jtleek2007/videos Here is a video about what goes wrong with regression, which is often more than what goes right.

Citizens of any skill level are invited to help us analyze crime in San Diego neighborhoods. Use your knowledge of the community or technical skill to create maps, discover anomalies, and better understand the causes and solutions to crime in San Diego. Come to the Kickoff meeting by signing up at Meetup.com Crime is always a top issue for any community, but San Diego residents, town councils and community planning groups seldom see neighborhood analysis of where crime occur, and less frequently get analysis of how crime relates to factors such as street lighting, traffic, housing, or alcohol. In this project we will collect data from the city, state and private organizations to create a range of maps and statistics that explain where crime is occurring and what factors are involved in increases or decreases in crime. This project needs your help,regardless of your skills or skill level. You can participate as a non technical community activist, Excel jockey, GIS expert, beginning programmer or experienced statistician. Want to know more?

This weekend, Saturday Feb 23, is International Open Data Day, sponsored by the Open Knowledge Foundation, and it is also Code Across America data, sponsored by Code for America. San Diego is participating, hosted by Open San Diego, and the Library staff will be there to talk about the Library and our Crime Mapping Project. If you’d like to participate in the conference sessions or hackathon, visit the EventBrite page to sign up. Hope to see you there.