[HN Gopher] Show HN: Little Fixes - a spatial forum to improve y...
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Show HN: Little Fixes - a spatial forum to improve your city
I love urban planning and think the way we interact with the built
environment is hugely impactful to individuals. But I also think
that most people have been trained to take the built environment as
a given rather than something that they have partial ownership of.
By building a place to discuss their community on a hyper-local
scale, I'm hoping to encourage residents to feel like they are an
important piece of their city. I thought building a sort of
spatial forum, where city residents can discuss the little
annoyances in their neighborhoods, might help people a) start
thinking about which parts of the built environment bug them and b)
realize that other people in their neighborhood probably have the
same complaint. Of course, I know that local politics can turn
nasty quickly, hence the name of the site: I'm hoping to keep
discussion focused on potential _fixes_ for each problem. If
you're excited about this but your city isn't on the list, I'm
happy to add it as long as you promise to make at least one post.
It's extra helpful if you go to geojson.io and create GeoJson for a
closed polygon that marks where you think the bounds for your city
should be (doesn't need to correlate with official city
boundaries), but I'm happy to guess and do that part myself. Let me
know here or by email if you want your city added!
Author : bkettle
Score : 48 points
Date : 2024-02-23 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (littlefixes.xyz)
(TXT) w3m dump (littlefixes.xyz)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| If there's no licensing problem, could you just import the
| current OSM polygons for cities?
|
| e.g. Denver -
| http://polygons.openstreetmap.fr/get_geojson.py?id=1411339&p...
|
| Based on this I found with DDG search:
| https://peteris.rocks/blog/openstreetmap-administrative-boun...
| bkettle wrote:
| Probably, yes--thanks for the link. Although I am somewhat
| hesitant to use official administrative boundaries because I
| feel like perceived boundaries are often different than
| official boundaries. As someone walking around the Boston area,
| or around Stanford, I want the experience to be good everywhere
| ---it doesn't matter much to me whether I'm officially in
| Boston or Cambridge or Palo Alto or Menlo park.
|
| So these boundaries are sort of meant to be more "places" than
| specifically cities. But long-term indeed it might not be
| practical to have these custom boundaries (maybe just removing
| the boundaries altogether, or loosening them, is the answer)
| InitialLastName wrote:
| In my region (an inner suburb of the Northeast Megalopolis)
| an attempt like this to use vague "place" boundaries would
| lead to a blur of overlapping boundaries that stretches for
| ~500 miles.
| ajbt200128 wrote:
| really cool, but wish the bounding box on the map was better
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| How is this different from SeeClickFix, which is working in
| hundreds of cities?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SeeClickFix
| bkettle wrote:
| It might not be! One difference between Little Fixes and
| 311-like apps is that I want to foster discussion among
| residents rather than offer a place to file complaints with the
| city. Most of the apps that I've seen don't allow discussion.
| Perhaps SeeClickFix is different; I haven't used it.
|
| One difference that I immediately see is that I can see any
| actual fixes when I go to SeeClickFix's site. When I go to
| Little Fixes, I do. And another difference is that I had fun
| building this one, and I didn't build SeeClickFix :)
| swatcoder wrote:
| Most of the existing entries look like annoyances for pedestrians
| and cyclists.
|
| When these nuisance topics come up on existing community forums,
| like NextDoor, Reddit, or City-Data, somebody usually knows
| somebody who knows somebody from city planning that confirms that
| it's an known annoyance but a compromise solution for a complex
| or expensive problem that needs to meet many needs.
|
| This crosswalk light needs to accommodate some critical car
| traffic issue, that bike lane inefficiency is the optimal
| solution given the inability to expand the road any wider, etc.
|
| How does your catalog go from being a wiki of annoyances that
| highlight intractable problems to something in dialog with the
| civil engineering professionals who need to weight many
| constraints?
|
| As a software professional, my nightmare would be somebody
| maintaining a permanent, public, antagonistic list of all the
| forced compromises I'm already frustrated with in my software. I
| know they're there and I hate them too, but that doesn't mean
| they're accidents.
| bkettle wrote:
| I'm not convinced that all of these annoyances are intentional.
| For example, one post [1] says that it's not clear where to go
| at the end of a bike path. This could be resolved with a sign
| that might cost $500 (complete guess) to install, and there are
| no complex constraints in the way of installing a sign. Another
| post [2] highlights discontinuities on the edge of two
| municipal jurisdictions. Again, a reasonable fix here does not
| require impeding car traffic or making any huge redesigns that
| require a civil engineer.
|
| It's not possible for the committee that's in charge of
| planning an entire city to be intimately familiar with the
| nuances of the way every intersection works for every driver,
| walker, and biker that pass through them every day. The people
| who pass through these intersections every day, though, _will_
| understand the design oversights and deteriorations. Some
| proposed fixes will be feasible, others might not. I think my
| major goal with a site like this is to get the public involved
| and talking among themselves.
|
| Perhaps it's too idealistic, but I see the process of building
| a city to be almost entirely distinct from delivering a
| software product. Every resident owns their city, and though
| there is a group of people that are paid to maintain it, it's
| every resident's right and responsibility to make the city work
| for them.
|
| [1]: https://littlefixes.xyz/city/boston/fix/5 [2]:
| https://littlefixes.xyz/city/palo-alto/fix/2
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _This could be resolved with a sign that might cost $500
| (complete guess) to install_
|
| There's no non-offensive way to say this, so I'll just say
| it: if you're just randomly guessing anyway, why not pull a
| different number out of your head? Why not $50, or $5000?
|
| > _and there are no complex constraints in the way of
| installing a sign._
|
| That you _know of_ , and given your guess of how much it
| costs to install a sign, I'm guessing there's lots about
| building out civic infrastructure that you don't know about.
|
| And I don't either! We have a big road nearby that's a
| nightmare to cross. There's some limply blinking signs that
| drivers mostly ignore, and I'd _love_ to have the city put in
| something better - humps, actual stop lights, etc - but there
| are measures in place to stop that from just happening over a
| weekend.
| basil-rash wrote:
| > As a software professional, my nightmare would be somebody
| maintaining a permanent, public, antagonistic list of all the
| forced compromises I'm already frustrated with in my software.
| I know they're there and I hate them too, but that doesn't mean
| they're accidents.
|
| I take it you've never worked in OSS.
| swatcoder wrote:
| It's why I avoid it!
| asdff wrote:
| The issue is not reporting these issues I find, its actually
| getting action. I used to reach out to my city representatives
| about these sorts of things. At this point, I've given up on
| that, realizing that I will never have my position actually heard
| unless I represent either a very large sum of money or an
| overwhelming majority of the people who actually vote in these
| local elections. They have no incentive to work for individual or
| minorities of their constituency. They alienate me they lose a
| measly one vote. They alienate an important donor and they can't
| afford to pitch themselves to voters and even run.
|
| Politicians don't fight for you, they fight for the betterment of
| their political careers and their own position. If they were in
| the job to actually quickly address and fix these sorts of local
| grievances, there wouldn't be so many of them left to address in
| the first place.
| mistermann wrote:
| Even funnier: they've somehow managed to convince everyone to
| _defend and promote_ this system!
|
| Truth is stranger than fiction as they say.
| config_yml wrote:
| My city has something similar based on fixmystreet, which is not
| focused on discussion but more on reporting:
| https://www.zueriwieneu.ch/reports
|
| I love that my city responds so quick to any issues reported.
| Usually you get a reply the next day, and minor things are
| usually resolved within the week. One time a guy even facetimed
| me to figure out the exact spot where some metal was sticking out
| of the ground near a playground, which I had reported.
| drusepth wrote:
| Awesome idea. Will check back in when Portland, OR is added as a
| city also.
| carols10cents wrote:
| It looks like accounts can be entirely anonymous. How are you
| planning on handling moderation of comments? What happens if I
| post on a neighbor's house "jagoff who lets their dogs poop
| everywhere lives here, please evict"?
| okapisrock wrote:
| Cool idea!
| mtmail wrote:
| https://fixmystreet.org/ (open source) has a similar aim. It
| comes with a backend for city staff, tracking of updates,
| notifications etc.
| bkettle wrote:
| Awesome, thanks for the link!
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(page generated 2024-02-23 23:00 UTC)