Travel – Code The City

When data glitches ruin your day

The Scotrail service between Aberdeen and Inverness is currently disrupted by some improvement works to the line between Aberdeen and Dyce. Bus replacement services are in operation between Aberdeen and Dyce, with normal service between Dyce and Inverness. All because the line has been dug up in preparation for new dual tracks being laid.

But if you do a search on the Scotrail website for the next train north from Aberdeen you get this message:

“No services between these stations have been found”. One would assume that Scotrail isn’t running services from Aberdeen to Insch. The same thing happens for searches to all stations north of Aberdeen. Continue reading When data glitches ruin your day

Bridge of Don Active Travel Hub – Innovation Day

Saturday 10^th December from 0900 – 1600 at Bridge of Don Academy, Aberdeen, AB22 8RR

Sport Aberdeen and Code the City are inviting people from across Bridge of Don and the wider Aberdeen area to take part in a full day community workshop looking at active travel ideas. The day will consider ideas to develop an Active Travel Hub in Bridge of Don which can promote and support cycling and walking in the community.

The event will be structured across a whole day, and allowing for drop in attendance throughout the day.

You can choose to drop in either morning or afternoon – or even stay for the full day if you like.

The day will involve:

Identification of potential opportunities or problems relating to the siting and functionality of an active travel hub in the Bridge of Don area.
Group idea generation session to address each of these areas employing a variety of appropriate techniques in order to generate the best ideas possible.
Team and group work to explore each idea – developing these to envision what future states might be.
Iterative development of prototype ‘solutions’.
Catering (teas, coffee, juices, snacks during the morning and afternoon and a sandwich / pizza lunch) for all participants.

Please register your interest via event brite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/active-travel-hub-innovation-day-tickets-29474133928

For more detail on the event please contact Susan Fraser, Project Development Manager, Sport Aberdeen sufraser@sportaberdeen.co.uk

Journeygrid

“We should build one for here!”

So starts another Codethecity conversation on discovering a neat data driven tool. This time it’s the excellent New York subway toy created by Jason Wright.

The tool allows you to redesign transit provision in the city by building new subway routes. By adding new stations. By removing or moving existing lines.

It’s addictive and fascinating.

As is so often the case, we then start riffing on what it could also do. It could time travel using that tram data we have from the early 1900s. It could give alternate route options if we hook up to that academic project we spoke with earlier in the year. It could carbon count. It could give safety information for cyclists. We could data collect with a new app to feed it improved validation data…

Before we have the cake we’re discuss how pretty the icing will look.

In reality what we should be looking at is the bottom layer. The underpinnings. The data.

Where do people live? Where do they work? Where do they school run? Where is the football stadium and where do the fans live? Where are the shops and where is the money?

We’re going to start with the commute. Where do people start, spend, and end their day? How do they move around? And when? No agenda. No grand insights planned. Just a good solid data gathering and modelling project.

We’re calling it journeygrid.

If you have any data, or methodologies for gathering and storing such data we’d love to speak to you.

You can find out more about the New York Subway project here, and you can play with it here.