Dataset Highlights
NYC Open Data would not exist without the work of Open Data Coordinators: City staff at each agency who are responsible for identifying, structuring, documenting, publishing, maintaining, and sharing their agency’s public datasets. As New York City evolves, so does the data that is used in its operations. And these changes often mean publishing a new dataset to share more about the work the agency is doing. This year, we’ve published more than 200 new datasets, all of which are available to view in our asset inventory, and some of which are highlighted below:
Seating Locations
Agency: Department of Transportation (DOT)
Dataset: Seating Locations
The NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) manages and maintains more than 2,100 seating locations throughout the five boroughs, consisting of:
- CityBenches - backed or backless benches for people to sit on, most often located near bus stops or in commercial areas
- LeaningBars - angled bars for people to lean on, along Select Bus Service routes. These can be particularly useful for people who find it more strenuous to sit.
With more installations scheduled for 2023, seating locations provide public seating at bus stops and street curbs to make NYC’s streets more comfortable for pedestrians and transit riders. The benches are for public use - not restricted to bus passengers, any building’s tenants, or a business’s patrons.
DOT considers the location of key business corridors and transportation hubs when deciding where seating should be placed. Anyone can also suggest a seating location using DOT’s online form. DOT staff assesses submissions to confirm suitability, considering factors such as sidewalk width, number of bus passengers who wait at the stop, and the local senior population. DOT ensures that the sidewalk is wide enough to accommodate potential sitters, people with accessibility needs, and pedestrians walking around any new seating. From there, the data gets processed by DOT and is ultimately added to their agency-wide geospatial data repository. After some review, this data is passed on to DOT’s Open Data team for publication.
This dataset can be used in conjunction with Bus Stop Shelters, NYC DOT Pedestrian Plazas (Map), Open Streets Locations, and the Temporary Art Program datasets to understand the relationship between seating and gathering places like bus stops, plazas, public art installations, and more. Users can even source areas listed in any of these other datasets to suggest where new seating could be installed. For example, DOT often looks to place seating near bus stops where there is not enough room to accommodate a bus stop shelter.
For more information about seating on NYC’s streets, visit DOT’s CityBench program page. You can also contribute to your community by nominating a seating location!
Zoning Application Portal Project Data
Agency: Department of City Planning (DCP)
Dataset: Zoning Application Portal (ZAP) - Project Data
Any time someone wants to make changes to their property that are not allowed by its current zoning, they must submit a land-use application following the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). The Department of City Planning (DCP) processes these applications and stores information about them in its Zoning Application Portal. ZAP Project Data brings this information to NYC Open Data and includes approximately 30,000 projects from ones just being filed to ones that have been completed – with some dating back to the late 1970s!
DCP gathers this data when forms are submitted via the applicant portal or when DCP employees enter data directly into the ZAP database. The information available for each project will change over the course of a project’s life cycle as different milestones in the review process are met.
Since ZAP was developed in 2018, most application data from years prior was migrated to ZAP from the former Land Use and City Environmental Quality Review Application Tracking System or LUCATS. To get ZAP onto Open Data, DCP’s data engineering team created scripts that pull raw data and process it to create public datasets. For more information on that process, please refer to the ZAP-opendata Github repository.
This dataset can be used with Zoning Application Portal (ZAP) - BBL, a dataset that contains tax lot information, also known as Borough/Block/Lot or BBL, related to each project listed in ZAP Project Data. These records can be used to map the data by joining the BBL field to either the Digital Tax Map (DTM) or MapPLUTO. Users may also be interested in other DCP datasets related to approved projects. For example, if an application for a zoning map change gets approved, that would impact either the Zoning Districts, Commercial Overlays, or Special District datasets – all of which are part of the NYC GIS Zoning Features data.
ZAP Project Data can be further explored by using the Zoning Application Portal search tool. In the future, DCP plans to release a geospatial version of ZAP Project Data and additional ZAP datasets related to individual applications & project milestones.
To report data errors or ask questions about ZAP, please send an email to zap_feedback_dl@planning.nyc.gov. To learn more about the application process, please visit the general Applications tab or the Application Process Overview section on DCP’s website.
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