Roadway Repairs Along Route

Transportation gets you from point A to B. But public comms may obscure impact with fancy names and lingo. Learn what's happening near you or along your favorite routes. Imagine a better paved future.

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Inspiration

I was inspired by this phrase in the problem statements: "A resident who sees orange construction cones on their street..." I had a realization... most public communications about infrastructure projects focus on the project name, location, budget, timeline and details in insolation from how real people experience infrastructure.

The real experience of everyday road users is based going from point A to point B and encountering good or bad roads along the way. Some of these encounters are with infrastructure like freshly painted streets, potholes or construction detours. Other encounters are safety concerns like speeding traffic.

What it does

One half (Near Me tab) answers the question: what Capital Improvement Projects are happening near me? The other half (Route Intersection tab) answers: what Capital Improvement Projects are happening along my route? To use the Near Me tab, select a location on the map, set a radius and the map will list infrastructure projects near you ordered from closest to furthest. For the Route Intersection tab, you enter a start and end address, click "Analyze Route" and the tool tells you how much of your route intersects with a Capital Improvement Project.

How we built it

First, I built the Near Me tab as a GIS app using many of the preset settings. Then, I asked a Cursor agent to create an iframe for that tab and code the route intersections tool. I connected to the GeoJSONs for both the Capital Improvement Projects data and the High Injury Network Data. When I had confirmation that the route was detecting collisions with the GIS objects from the data sources, I asked the agent to code a frontend.

Challenges we ran into

  1. External to hackathon: My wife needed to be out of town for the weekend so I was the solo parenting a 3 yo and a 10 month old from Friday onwards.
  2. Interpersonal: My original team only had one teammate and he couldn't make it. My adopted team jumped on some solutions they had a lot of experience with but I couldn't contribute to. Also, I couldn't spend all day on location with them because of the children.
  3. I can't code: I'm a UX designer, a content writer and a data nerd. I took half a Python course 2 years ago and got bored. I would get stuck on silly problems.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm most proud of the concept behind it and how it could expand to do many things. By visualizing GIS data by how objects intersect with a route, you can find intersections for many data types. For instance, the tool could show drivers how much of their route lacks sidewalks and advise caution on those sections of road.

What we learned

I learned that there is no "Run" button in GitHub to see how your code is working. LOL.

What's next for Roadway Repairs Along Route

I'm always tinkering with projects like this. I try to look for ways to combine them with my Strong Towns advocacy work.

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