But have been too busy calculating access to gaming machine venues across NZ to pretty it up. The gambling access calculations have not been without problems. Will post on problems and solutions when I finish calculating…

I recently gave a talk about community mapping at a Living Streets Aotearoa meeting. This post contains the examples of community mapping that I mentioned in the talk. All these examples all fall within my general area of research, i.e. social health and wellbeing, and almost all of these examples use google maps.

Note:  By “community mapping” I mean maps made by the community. There are other things it might possible be called or related to: neogeography, participatory mapping, volunteered geographic information, collaborative mapping etc. I didn’t have time to figure out the appropriate name.

Example 1: Mapping the location of fruit and urban edibles

• City Fruit (Seattle)
• Bloomington Urban Harvest
• Fernwood Fruit Tree Project
• Fitzroy Feral Fruit Map
• New Zealand Fruit and Food Share Map

Example 2: Bicycle routes

• MapMyRide
• Bikely
• Ride the City – safe bike routes in NYC,. This is more a map for the community than a map by the community, but I thought it was interesting

Example 3: Walkability & Cycleability audits

• Woodbridge Township Safe Routes to School project - schools & community participate in walkability audits to figure out safe routes to school.

Example 4 – Mapping perceptions of the environment

• Rescue Geography’s Eastside project - not all these are collaborative, but there are interesting google earth and google maps that include stories, quotes, photos, video and ambinet sounds of the city. There is also an interesting cycling perceptions project underway.

The International Journal of Conservation (Oryx) has a good list of free and open source research tools.

Zotero is my favourite.

The research design and methods paper for the URBAN (Understanding the Relationship Between physical Activity and Neighbourhood) study has been published in BMC Public Health. This is the project where I calculated walkability for neighbourhoods and use this to select neighbourhoods with high and low walkability for the study.

The focus of the conference is Maori GIS projects and GIS related projects relevant to Maori aspirations. It is being held in Christchurch from 13-15 May 2009.

EOI for presenters close 15 April.

http://www.ngaitahu.iwi.nz/Events/2009/GIS-Maori-Conference/

Converting data between csv, Access, Excel and ArcGIS can be a hassle, especially when dates and times are involved.

One of today’s dilemmas was how to convert decimal time into 24 hour time in ArcGIS.

Decimal times converts as follows:

1 = 24:00, 0.75 = 18:00, 0.5 = 12:00, and 0.729167 = 17:30.

In Excel you just change the data format. But today I spent what seemed like hours trying to figure out the formula so I could do it in ArcGIS. This time I didn’t want to resort to importing the data back  into Excel and into stuffing around trying to get it to export how I wanted it and then importing back into ArcGIS etc…

Anyway. Here is how to calculate it in ArcGIS (or anything else really).

Given a field with the existing decimal time ([DecTime]). Create fields to store the [Hour] and [Minute].

Calculate as follows:

[Hour] = Int([DecTime]*24)

[Minute] = Int([DecTime*24) - [Hour])*60)

Now you can combine the hour and minute parts of the 24 hour time however you want. For example,

[Time24] = [Hour] * 100 + [Minute]

or

[Time24] = [Hour] & “:” & [Minute]

The handy guide to Publishing in Geography by RGS-IBG and Wiley-Blackwell.

Via Very Spatial.

Had a very interesting visitor yesterday: Jago Dodson from the Urban Research Program at Griffith University in Australia. Jago has published research on measurement of Oil Vulnerability in Australian cities eg:

Oil Vulnerability in the Australian City: Assessing Socioeconomic Risks from Higher Urban Fuel Prices (Dodson and Sipe, 2007)
Shocking the Suburbs: Urban Location, Housing Debt and Oil Vulnerability in the Australian City (Dodson and Sipe, 2006)

Oil vulnerability is measured by combining various census variables (mode of transport to work, number of cars in a household) and socioeconomic data (SEIFA) to produce the VIPER (Vulnerability Index for Petrol Expense Rise).

The VAMPIRE (Vulnerability Assessment for Mortgage,Petrol and Inflation Risks and Expenditure) is a measure of oil and mortgage vulnerability and includes mortgage information.

I decided to try this for a NZ city. Here is a quick lo-res attempt at an Auckland VIPER:

VIPER index from 2006 census data. Dark = more vulnerable to oil price increases. Light = less vulnerable.

Now I just need to find some mortgage data, cause even though VIPER is a pretty cool name, I love the idea of creating a VAMPIRE index!

Went to NZ Geographical Society conference last week. Report to follow. But I will say it was freezing and that I bought ear muffs from Spacesuit.

Now I only have 3 more conferences to go to this year:

1. Walking 08
2. Geocart/SIRC 08
3. NZ ESRI User conference

One a month. And I have to present at all of them. Ick! I still hate presenting. The people who say “it gets easier” are wrong.

Yesterday Reid Ewing, a Research Professor at the National Center for Smart Growth, visited SHORE and gave a talk that touched on various aspects of the relationship between the Built Environment and Public Health.

He talked about the sprawl index they developed, which is comprised of: low density, highly segregated land use, lack of centering, and poor street connectivity. Low accessibility is also a characteristic of sprawl.

Sprawl has been linked to outcomes like: increased VMT (Vehicle Miles Traveled), worse air quality, climate change, and traffic safety.

Climate change and traffic safety were new ideas things for me.

Reid also mentioned the 6 “D” variables that influence travel at the meso and micro scale: Density, Diversity, Design, Demographics, Distance to transit, and Destination accessibility.

Some of those D’s are relatively straightforward. Design is more complicated to measure but the key point is that “human scale” design is good.

A very interesting comment that Reid made was that Destination accessibility is the most important variable in terms of VMT. This relates to the CO2 project ie my model which measures change in accessibility under different transport scenarios.