Oakland is rapidly changing. The city and its residents are making decisions today that will shape life in Oakland for years. The community is motivated to ensure the city’s development reflects their values and creates the lifestyle they want, but they don’t have a way to see the impact of development choices on their neighborhoods.
Project Urban Graph (PUG) provides a framework for Oakland's communities to quantify and visualize the effects of new urban developments on transportation, sustainability, and civic life at large.
When we say graph, we are using the definition used in math: a network of things (nodes) and the connections between them (edges). Everything in a city is connected, after all. By structuring open-source city data as a graph, we can answer simple questions like:
- What is the most well-lit path from point A to point B?
- What is the path with the most trees from point A to point B?
- What is the average distance to every bus stop less than 5’ away from point A?
- What is the average distance to every park less than 5’ away from point A?
As well as more complex questions like:
- How does the new shopping center affect traffic along Broadway Street?
- Where do we need more parking to accommodate residents of the new apartment building?
- Does increased lighting along Grand Avenue reduce crime rates in the area?