Seattle open data

Who's riding on the Burke Gilman trail this week?

In this project, we will gather civic data from data.seattle.gov and use it to ask and answer important questions about the Emerald City!. We will start with a series of analyses of bike and pedestrian traffic patterns on the Burke-Gilman Trail.

We will learn how to collect that data from the Seattle's open data portal's API, filter and transform this data, and create timeseries graphs that show daily, weekly, and yearly traffic trends.

Goals

In this session, we will focus on...

• Learn how to pose useful research questions that can be asked and answered with civic data
• Learn how to filter, bucket, and format data for building timeseries graphs in a spreadsheet program
• Familiarizing ourselves with a new API
• Practice reading and extending other people's code

Setup

If you are confused by these steps, go back and refresh your memory with the Day 0 setup and tutorial.

Download the Seattle open data project

1. Click the following link and save the file to your computer: https://github.com/jtmorgan/cdsw-2020/archive/master.zip
2. Unzip cdsw-2020-master.zip folder and place the folder in your CDSW working directory (or just your desktop)

Test the Seattle open data API

Test an API call to data.seattle.gov

1. Open the Jupyter notebook SODA_API_demo.ipynb
2. Run the first code cell in the notebook

The output of cell should look like:

"https://data.seattle.gov/resource/76t5-zqzr.json?$where=(PermitNum='6531736-PH')"
[{'applieddate': '2016-10-07',
 'contractorcompanyname': 'M A MORTENSON COMPANY',
 'description': 'Construct institutional building (University of Washington, '
                'Computer Science and Engineering Dept.), occupy per plan.',
 'estprojectcost': '23886804',
 'expiresdate': '2020-04-03',
 'housingunitsadded': '0',
 'housingunitsremoved': '0',
 'issueddate': '2017-04-03',
 'latitude': '47.65300378',
 'link': {'url': 'https://cosaccela.seattle.gov/portal/customize/LinkToRecord.aspx?altId=6531736-PH'},
 'location1': {'human_address': '{"address": "3800 EAST STEVENS WAY NE", '
                                '"city": "SEATTLE", "state": "WA", "zip": '
                                '"98195"}',
               'latitude': '47.65300378',
               'longitude': '-122.30500427'},
 'longitude': '-122.30500427',
 'originaladdress1': '3800 EAST STEVENS WAY NE',
 'originalcity': 'SEATTLE',
 'originalstate': 'WA',
 'originalzip': '98195',
 'permitclass': 'Institutional',
 'permitclassmapped': 'Non-Residential',
 'permitnum': '6531736-PH',
 'permittype': 'Building',
 'permittypedesc': 'New',
 'statuscurrent': 'Completed'}]

Other open Seattle datatasets to explore

• Fremont bridge bicycle counter: https://data.seattle.gov/Transportation/Fremont-Bridge-Bicycle-Counter/65db-xm6k
• Spokane Street bridge bicycle counter: https://data.seattle.gov/Transportation/Spokane-St-Bridge-Bicycle-Counter/upms-nr8w
• Mountain to Sound trail bicycle + pedestrian counter: https://data.seattle.gov/Transportation/MTS-Trail-west-of-I-90-Bridge-Bicycle-and-Pedestri/u38e-ybnc
• Seattle police Terry stops: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Terry-Stops/28ny-9ts8
• Seattle building permits: https://data.seattle.gov/Permitting/Building-Permits/76t5-zqzr
• Seattle road temperature: https://data.seattle.gov/Public-Safety/Road-Weather-Information-Stations/egc4-d24i/data