Viewing Traffic Improvements Interactively
Despite the low turnout of residents at the District 4 town hall meeting, one of the greatest assets available was the amount of information concerning future roadway projects in Douglas County. On display were 12 various diagrams representing different intersections/corridors in different phases of planning which will be slowly implemented later this year and into 2008.
Also made available was a set of documents going in depth about how Douglas County will confront a 5+ year old weakened transportation infrastructure. Displaying large diagrams on easels, having paper documents and some downloadable content has been the norm for providing the public information. But what if there was a way to display traffic improvement information digitally and interactively with one click?
For any community that is facing growing pains, availability of information is key to establishing a sound base of communication between citizen and government. The more information that is available, the more a citizen can understand the impact of future endeavours while helping maintain a strong community.
The reliance of digital technology will always be skeptical for some since there is always an associated risk of data loss, information being attained in the wrong hands or further complications to older platforms. However proven technology should be embraced in a way that will further aid the availability of information as well as create alternative methods to provide community resources.
In this case I used traffic improvement information collected at the town hall meeting in order to create a demonstration using Google Earth and Google Maps. Of the ten pages that outlined various transportation projects, eight were able to be used based on useable data that could be implemented into Google Earth.
Major project sections were given their own folder where then other projects could be subdivided. For instance the 2006 Douglas County Safety Action Plan is subdivided into four folders that contain colored vectors illustrating different lengths of roadways that will see improvement.
It took approximately five hours to complete using a free program. One of the many advantages about the KML file architecture is that it can be viewed online using Google Maps, which means that anyone who does not have Google Earth installed on their computer still has an alternative to view the information.
The use of Google Earth grows by the day as the application becomes beneficial to so many people, whether it is sharing information on traffic improvements, understanding the impact of Hurricane Katrina or demonstrating the ill effects of mountaintop removal.
There are many large municipalities using Google Earth and SketchUp to demonstrate future development. Should this out-of-the-box idea be something that Metro Atlanta and the West Georgia Region adopt?
Interactive Transportation Demo
- Download for Google Earth
- View in Google Maps - Ignore syntax error, please wait for Google Maps to process the KMZ file
Fantastic data representation…
Keep up the great work!
March 27th, 2007 at 11:32 pm