[HN Gopher] City of Boulder Open Data
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City of Boulder Open Data
Author : mooreds
Score : 94 points
Date : 2023-11-26 14:08 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (open-data.bouldercolorado.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (open-data.bouldercolorado.gov)
| jeffbee wrote:
| Looks pretty standard for a small city open data site.
| edrxty wrote:
| Yes but it's Boulder, the promised land, according to here
| Someguy1098 wrote:
| Been there. It's very expensive and crowded but it's really
| nice being like 15 minutes from some of the nicest hiking
| trails in the country.
| ttyprintk wrote:
| The city and county GIS is exceptional. Backpacking and
| camping permits are egalitarian, but you need to plan
| months or years ahead.
| jebarker wrote:
| The GIS has been really helpful when we've had close by
| fires too
| jebarker wrote:
| I live in Boulder. It's certainly expensive, although more
| reasonable than some of the other popular tech cities. I
| honestly don't think of it as crowded though. There's
| tourist spots to avoid, but plenty of open space for all.
| justinator wrote:
| _> and crowded_
|
| Oh yes, with the 5 story limit of the height of the
| buildings - and a year over year growth of 1%.
|
| Super crowded.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The CAGR is 0.1%, 0.6%, or 0.4%, over 10, 20, or 30 years
| respectively.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| CAGR is misleading because it tracks population when what
| is more important is household growth. Household size has
| fallen from 2.63 in 1993 to 2.51 today, which doesn't
| sound like a lot, but means you need 5% more houses to
| hold the same number of people.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yes, and there is a general misunderstanding, mostly a
| willful misunderstanding among older, established
| homeowners, of the fact that you need to build more
| housing just to keep the population the same, especially
| when older people are squatting on empty family-sized
| homes.
| Someguy1098 wrote:
| Wouldn't 5 story limit's on buildings just make it feel
| more crowded by constraining the growth?
| mp05 wrote:
| Boulder is the worst best small town in America. You know
| what I mean.
| CPLX wrote:
| Boulder is more accurately described as a neighborhood or
| region of Denver.
|
| If that's not obvious today it certainly will be when the
| staggering construction in Arvada, Broomfield, and so on,
| has filled in all of the areas that could plausibly be used
| to argue otherwise.
| patrick451 wrote:
| It's not a small town, but rather a suburb of Denver.
| justinator wrote:
| It's 25 miles away from Denver.
| patrick451 wrote:
| What's your point? Denver is a massive sprawling metro.
| Sparkle-san wrote:
| There's still a lot of open space between Boulder and the
| surrounding cities. I'd argue Denver ends in that
| direction at Broomfield.
| scarecrowbob wrote:
| From my limited perspective there isn't much space.
|
| I'm a bit of a stranger to the area- right now I am in a
| Starbucks in (I think?) Boulder. But I came out to work
| as a tech with an audio company I contract for to do
| concerts up at some ski resort. And I am sleeping in my
| truck front of the Warehouse in Broomfield. But the guy
| who hires me has a house in Boulder where he keeps a lot
| of our equipment... and I am often not super clear about
| when I am just crossing a large green space and when I am
| crossing into different cities.
|
| So you are probably right, but that's not how I've been
| experiencing this over the last summer's worth of gigs.
|
| Of course, to me the drive from Boulder to FoCo seems
| like one continuous city.
|
| Contextually, it might be the fact that I come out for
| work from Durango, and crossing the san luis valley is
| what "open space" looks like to me.
|
| So maybe I'm just not sufficiently calibrated for the
| city yet.
| justinator wrote:
| Denver is in a different county altogether. There's a
| county in between Boulder and Denver counties, saying
| nothing of them being the same city.
| CPLX wrote:
| Brooklyn and Manhattan are in different counties too.
|
| Ask yourself questions like what airport do you fly to
| and where would you take your kids to the children's
| museum if you lived there and you'll realize what city
| Boulder is a part of.
| ghaff wrote:
| Boulder probably has enough of a unique character that
| thinking of it as its own thing rather than just a
| commuter suburb is probably reasonable. But there are
| certainly places within 25+ miles of Boston, say, that
| are reasonably described as suburbs and probably exurbs
| out to about 50 miles. (It's how ESRI would generally
| describe them.)
|
| It sort of depends. To use another Boston area example,
| no one would reasonably consider Portsmouth or Nashua in
| NH as suburbs even though people will go into Boston for
| a night's entertainment and probably fly out of the
| airport.
| lskdnvldn wrote:
| I don't know, but based on this entire thread, I think this
| was one of the places that was popular for people to move
| from cities during the pandemic, when everyone was working
| remotely. Its fascinating to me that for decades people
| have been moving to the same cities from places like
| Boulder (and many such all over the country) for
| opportunities/careers/lives and now a few chose to move
| from the cities to these small towns. While I understand
| that people do not like change but how is this any
| different, its still people making a choice of moving to a
| different place in the country which they think is better
| for their lives? Isn't this NIMBY, its fine as long as
| everyone moves to NY, but not here.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I lived there for 6 years and halfheartedly agree. It's a
| very nice town in terms of general quality of life -
| definitely the best I've ever experienced, and I've lived
| all over America. But there's a pretentiousness in the air
| that can be utterly nauseating at times. The "Boulder
| bubble" is real.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Too commercial, too many rich brats, expensive, nice access
| to nature but too crowded. The western side of the Rockies
| are superior imo.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| What cities do you suggest west of the Rockies?
| Omnipresent wrote:
| This is pretty neat. Wonder if they're using some data catalog
| under the covers for the search screen or is it all custom built.
| simonw wrote:
| Looks like that one is using https://hub.arcgis.com/
|
| Another common platform for these is https://dev.socrata.com
| GavinAnderegg wrote:
| It looks like ArcGIS, which is what my city of Halifax, NS also
| uses: https://catalogue-hrm.opendata.arcgis.com/
| booleanbetrayal wrote:
| It is ArcGIS. Here is their Emergency Operations Center
| overlay:
|
| https://bouldercounty.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/inde.
| ..
|
| You get used to refreshing this page during down-slope,
| windy, red flag days.
| simonw wrote:
| These are surprisingly common for local governments these days -
| this site lists 598 of them: https://dataportals.org/
|
| Here's another collection with more than 3,700:
| https://data.opendatasoft.com/explore/dataset/open-data-sour...
| nerdponx wrote:
| My local city government also recently published a detailed
| interactive online GIS map of the city, including all lot
| boundaries, buried utilities, etc. It's great to feel like the
| public can easily access what is meant to be public record,
| rather than relying on for-profit third parties to make it
| available to us.
| apwheele wrote:
| I really like the ESRI API's (much faster than Socrata). This
| is a crazy url, but they do allow for different SQL
| operations (including spatial operations) right in the API.
| Here is top 10 crime street segments in Raleigh for example:
|
| https://services.arcgis.com/v400IkDOw1ad7Yad/ArcGIS/rest/ser.
| ..
|
| If you go to https://services.arcgis.com/v400IkDOw1ad7Yad/Arc
| GIS/rest/ser... you can putz around in the query engine to
| figure out the API strings (easier than reading the ESRI docs
| anyway!)
| renewiltord wrote:
| I like SF's. You can plot recent crime and stuff.
| https://data.sfgov.org/browse?tags=crime+reports
| mistrial9 wrote:
| is this associated with vehicle tracking by license plate,
| 24x7x365, by any chance? In San Diego County it is, same vendors
| most likely.
| chaps wrote:
| Just be VERY careful when using any of these open data sets.
| Datasets will undoubtedly be filtered by some unwritten criteria.
| It's best to use these datasets as a sanity check for some
| things, with follow-up FOIA requests for the serious work. And
| even that will be filled with similar filtering. Source: spent
| the last ten years working with open data and FOIA in Chicago.
|
| Also, here's a tweet-fitting one liner I wrote that downloads all
| Socrata CSV datasets across all gov instances:
| mkfifo f;echo a>f&xargs -E, -a<(cat f) -I{} bash -c "wget
| http://api.us.socrata.com/api/catalog/v1?scroll_id={} -O-|jq -r '
| .results[]|.resource.id+"\","\"+.metadata.domain+"\"/api/views/\"
| "+.resource.id+"\"/rows.csv\""'|tee <(cut -d, -f2|xargs wget -P{}
| --content-disposition)|tail -1"|tee f
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(page generated 2023-11-26 23:00 UTC)