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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; these changes often mean publishing a new dataset to share more about the work the agency is doing. Take a look at some of our most notable new datasets and their projects below:
New York City’s Flood Vulnerability Index
Agency: Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice (MOCEJ)
Dataset: New York City’s Flood Vulnerability Index
The Flood Vulnerability Index (FVI) is the first map in New York City’s history to visualize flooding risk and social indicators of vulnerability together in one tool. It’s available on NYC Open Data and featured in the EJNYC Mapping Tool. The FVI map was generated as a part of the NYC Town+Gown , a city-academic partnership led by The New School. VIA brought together researchers from multiple disciplines and institutions to study vital and emerging issues related to climate impacts in New York City. They were charged with developing the FVI, which will help inform city policy and priorities around flood interventions.
Over the course of a year-and-a-half, the team of natural and social scientists evaluated why some communities are more at risk to damage from flooding and have more difficulty recovering. After isolating 12 socio-economic indicators of vulnerability to flooding (including race, language isolation, income, and age), they mapped them across the city along with coastal flooding exposure maps to show what areas are most likely to flood now and in the future under different scenarios. The result is a tool that city agencies and communities can use to assess relative vulnerability to coastal flooding. The FVI has been used as one input to help inform the selection of Climate Strong Communities and location of FloodNet sensors. The Mayor’s Office of Climate & Environmental Justice hopes to continue to improve the FVI as additional data and updated flood hazard maps become available.
More details on the methodology and research process behind the creation of the FVI are available in the Final Report of the Vulnerability, Impacts, and Adaptation Analysis, which was released in April 2024. To learn more about climate and environmental justice in New York City, and to use the interactive EJNYC Mapping Tool, visit Environmental Justice NYC.
Citywide Mobility Survey
Agency: Department of Transportation (DOT)
Data Collection: Citywide Mobility Survey
The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) conducts a household travel survey called the Citywide Mobility Survey (CMS) to assess New York City residents’ travel behavior, preferences, and attitudes. Launched in 2017 and repeated in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022, the survey is one of the most frequent and comprehensive of its kind in the country.
The CMS offers valuable insights into how travel patterns have evolved over time and have been affected by events like the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, the 2022 survey found that walking, driving, and biking have increased since 2019, while transit use has declined. The survey captured the increase in online shopping and at-home deliveries, with 42% of households reporting that they receive a delivery on any given day, up from 32% in 2019. The CMS also provides insights into gender disparities in cycling. While the share of New Yorkers using a bicycle increased from 33% in 2019 to 42% in 2022, a significant gender gap persists, with men accounting for 80% of bike trips. However, this gap narrows when considering any biking activity, with 48% of men and 36% of women biking at least once in 2022.
The 2022 CMS collected complete travel behavior data from 2,966 resident adults in the fall of 2022, who collectively recorded 79,530 trips across 15,926 travel days. The survey primarily employs address-based sampling (ABS) to recruit participants, and NYC DOT takes a number of steps to ensure participation from as representative a cross-section of New York as possible. For example, DOT provides several ways to participate in the survey – online, by phone, and via a downloadable mobile phone app – and the agency offers the survey in multiple languages. DOT also sends extra invitations to census tracts that tend to have lower participation rates. New Yorkers can access data collected by the survey through NYC Open Data. Because of the complexity of the dataset, users should refer to the latest user guide for details on the survey design, the methods used to develop survey weights, and recommended analytical techniques.
Looking ahead, NYC DOT is currently conducting the 2024 CMS, with data expected to be released in early 2025. DOT aims to continue this effort with surveys every other year. This dataset can be used in conjunction with Demographic, Social, Economic, and Housing Profiles to provide a comprehensive understanding of transportation behavior and choices for different profiles.
For more information and updates on using the data, visit DOT’s Citywide Mobility Survey page.
Capital Projects Dashboard
Agency: Mayor’s Office of Operations
Dataset: Capital Projects Dashboard
In November 2023, the city launched a new Capital Projects Dashboard, mandated by Local Law 37 of 2020. This new tool allows users to view the status and budget of all capital projects from major agencies. A capital project “provides for the construction, reconstruction, acquisition or installation of a physical public betterment or improvement,” spanning critical infrastructure such as bridges, sewers, sanitation, and parks. This is the first tracker and dataset of its kind, providing a detailed view into the city’s construction projects in one tool. Historically, users had to pull various data sources maintained by different agencies to begin to monitor a particular project. The new dashboard, and corresponding Open Data datasets, merges schedule information from agency project management systems with budget information in the city’s Financial Management System. The data encompasses comprehensive project schedule and budget details. For the schedule, it features forecasted and actual milestone dates, along with any variances. Regarding the budget, it includes the original project budget, actual costs, and a complete record of all changes. These datasets will enhance the overall capital process by providing data transparency to both the public and inter-agency stakeholders, who rely on the availability of high-quality data throughout the project lifecycle.
This tracker and dataset were years in the making, with the challenge of developing standardized and authoritative data pipelines and a comprehensive schema. Future improvements to the tracker and opportunities for additional analysis include adding an interactive map showcasing the location and geographic context of each project; and implementing a comprehensive system of project classifications, enabling New Yorkers to filter projects based on criteria like infrastructure type and climate or environmental priority.
New York City Public Restrooms
Agency: Chief Public Realm Officer, Mayor’s Office of Operations, Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI)
Dataset: Public Restrooms
A perennial issue facing people who travel throughout NYC is public restroom access. As of writing, New York City has almost 1,000 operational, free public restrooms in our parks, libraries, plazas, and even privately owned public spaces. But until now, information on where these restrooms are could not be found in one place, making it difficult to find a restroom to use on the go, when you gotta go.
In an effort to address this, the Chief Public Realm Officer and the public realm team at City Hall collected the location, hours of operation, accessibility, and additional amenities of public restrooms from the agencies who administer public restrooms in New York City: the Department of Parks and Recreation (DPR), Department of Transportation (DOT), New York Public Library (NYPL), Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), Queens Public Library (QPL), and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). This June, Mayor Adams announced the release of this dataset on Open Data and its publication as a Google Map layer.
NYC Open Data is primarily a platform for individual agencies to publish their data assets – few datasets contain information maintained by multiple agencies in the sense that this new Public Restrooms dataset does. To keep this dataset up to date, the public realm team will continue to work with the six agencies listed above to reflect whether restrooms are currently in operation, changes to their opening hours and amenities, and the opening of new restrooms. Previously, much of this data may have been found scattered across datasets detailing physical assets maintained by each agency. Bringing this data together can help us both find public restrooms open now, and think about where more public restrooms are needed. Upon the announcement of this dataset, Mayor Adams said “Part of making New York City a more livable city is tackling the little things–the things we don’t think about until we need them. Access to public restrooms is high on that list, maybe even number one or two.” Through the “Ur in Luck” initiative, the City will build 46 new public restrooms and renovate 36 existing ones within the next five years, as well ensure existing restrooms are more visible and available to all. The Public Restrooms dataset will both help inform these changes and will soon reflect them.
Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report
Agency: Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI)
Dataset: Algorithmic Tools Compliance Report
In 2022, New York City enacted Local Law 35, which requires annual reporting on algorithmic tools that are used to make or assist with decisions that have a public impact. In order to make this data easier to analyze, the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI) has converted this reporting from a static report into an interactive dataset. This new format makes it easier for OTI, other agencies, and the public to discover common ways agencies are using algorithmic tools to support their work, and to consider areas where governance of algorithmic tools may be most helpful.
Each year, OTI considers how to ensure that this reporting is easy to access, analyze, and understand. Last year, a number of changes were made to make the agencies’ responses more categorical and easier to review. For example, the vendor name was separated from the description of the vendor’s involvement (if applicable), which would allow users to quickly identify vendors with experience addressing specific problems. As published in the AI Action Plan in October 2023, OTI will continue to expand on this reporting, as it is foundational to developing and implementing governance of AI.
Vital Parks Explorer
Agency: NYC Parks
Dataset: Vital Parks Explorer
New York City’s parks are vital. Our new plan, Vital Parks for All, aims to equitably strengthen the health, environment and communities of NYC through our Parks system. It includes a $3.2 billion initial investment in our city’s living infrastructure, prioritizing underserved communities. As part of this massive investment in parks, we’re sharing NYC Open Data with the public through our new web tool, the Vital Parks Explorer.
The Vital Parks Explorer gives an average citizen the capacity to ask - and answer - “What is NYC Parks providing in my community, how does it compare to other communities? Where can they improve, and how?” By interacting with the Vital Parks Explorer map users can see which NYC Parks resources are available as well as what level of access exists for any New Yorker to each component of a Vital Parks System. Leveraging Open Data, the Explorer offers transparency into how NYC Parks serves different pockets of our city across 20 elements, including events and public programming, recreational facilities, access to nature and green spaces, pools and beaches, and more. Members of the public can zoom in to any city block and see what amenities are available within a short walk or transit ride and compare that to other streets or neighborhoods. The tool empowers individuals, community groups, elected officials, or anyone who wants to advocate for more resources where they are needed.
It aligns data gathered and governed by divisions across the agency into a single resource, available to the public for the first time. It was built entirely in-house, using existing staff and incorporating or developing data streams.
In combining dozens of underlying data sources into a uniform display, we were challenged to simplify and standardize each metric along a similar scale. Overcoming this challenge has allowed us to develop park access reports that are available at a community district and even a block level.
Another interesting challenge we faced was balancing the needs of various audiences. While evaluations at the community board level can be more useful for elected officials as they determine where their capital and expense funding for parks will have the most impact, the typical New Yorker might want to know what’s in their neighborhood without regard to community board boundaries. Ultimately, we designed the tool to serve multiple uses at once.
There are several projects that were launched prior to or in parallel with Vital Parks for All, both to directly provide metrics used in the Vital Parks Explorer but also as standalone tools that help give clarity to how we define, measure, and invest in our Vital Parks System. For example, the Park Condition Score (PCS) feeds one of the elements of VP Explorer (access to parks with a PCS > 95) but is also a metric that is updated in real time on the NYC Parks public website for each of our properties. Based on highly vetted multi-faceted inspection data it is a quick assessment (a single number ranging from 0-100) of a Park’s condition that reflects various aspects of what makes a park feel clean, safe, and vital, such as the amount of litter, the state of structural elements like play equipment or public restrooms, or the condition of the trees and lawns. A deep dive into how the score is calculated (with code and underlying datasets) is available on NYC Parks’ Github page.
The Park Condition Scores can also be found on park pages, along with other metrics, which we are calling Vital Signs. These “vital signs” include measurements of specific Vital Parks elements, such as the number of mapped trees within the park, or the size of recent capital investment. As we are planning to do with the Vital Parks Explorer itself, the Vital Signs are updated frequently, using the same datasets that are used internally by NYC Parks staffers. This encourages long-term governance of the data and ensures that the data reflects a snapshot in time.
Other projects, tools, and resources that were essential to the success of VP Explorer, some currently used by Parks staff only, others publicly available, are the Let’s Green NYC Dashboard, the PEP Coverage Dashboard, the NYC Tree Map, the Capital Project Tracker, the LION dataset, and various Parks amenity datasets on Open Data, to name a few. Each of these allows users to take a deeper dive into individual elements of the Vital Parks System. Supporting code and datasets that were products of this analyses will be made available on Open Data and via GitHub.
The data inputs need to refresh to keep the Vital Parks Explorer accurate and relevant in real time. Not all elements need to be updated at the same frequency: PCS scores for individual parks could change slightly day to day whereas access to waterfronts, for example, will not change very often. The plan is to automate updates to as many elements of Vital Parks Explorer as is necessary. Parks plans to release the underlying data that feeds the Vital Parks Explorer by the end of this year.
More information about this project and your organization’s work and mission can be found on the Parks website.