streetsmartphl.phila.gov (PickupPHL)

[angelo trivelli]

I've been looking a lot at streetsmartphl.

It has very fine-grained information about trash and recycling pick-ups, displaying the times that trash and recycling was picked up on any given block across all sanitation zones.

Lately the streets department has been consistently late with pick-ups, but they're still telling people to put their trash out on the scheduled day. So I resorted to using streetsmartphl to figure out when to put my trash out. Looking at adjacent zones for 2-3 days, you can start to see patterns and it becomes fairly clear which day the garbage truck is coming to your block.

Obviously, it would be better if the streets department just indicated on the web-app which zones they're going to pick-up on any given day but it's still interesting to look at the data visualization of trash collection for a city of 1.5 million people. It's an enormous task when you start to consider the details of what the trash collectors are doing. 

That said, I got some questions:

* Does anyone know how they collect the information streetsmartphl? There's some press  releases about it, but they're no independent articles that I can find. It's been in operation for almost a year now. I'd like learn more about the details. The program is "beta", is there a roadmap for future features? 

* As far as I can eyeball it, the information seems accurate. Does anyone have any insight on the quality of the data? Is it like Septa bus arrival times? Better? Worse? I haven't actually logged times that trash was collected and compared them to what appears on the app (I want to, but maybe there are even bigger geeks than me who've already done it?).

* The web app uses an api product from Cyclomedia called "street-smart". This makes me think there's A LOT MORE data available for querying. For one thing, it would be useful to query historical data rather than just the current day's progress. Has anyone gotten an api-key and played around with streetsmartphl's data? Is this something that's available for anyone who's interested or only city employees?

Thanks!

-AT.

[Robert Cheetham]

AT,

I can't speak to any of your questions, but the Streets Dept generally has GPS devices on all of its trucks, and, if I had to guess, they are using the coordinate paths to determine when streets have had trash detected. But this is just a guess. The Streets Dept has long been a leader in terms of its use of advanced routing tools for trash collection, collecting data about paving, street closures, and snow clearing, and it's possible that they've got another way to collect this data.

Best,

Robert

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