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GIS - Helping To Find Commuting Solutions

A GIS or geographic information system is a program that allows you to display many kinds of information or data that has a spatial (or locational) quality. These data may be a picture of your town taken from space, points depicting the location of your favorite fishing sites or tax lots in your county. Not only does a GIS tell us where stuff is, it shows us where stuff is in relation to other stuff. A GIS can be run on a desktop computer by installing software or it can be run online on someone else’s server. Some GIS programs are free, some are very expensive. Google Earth, ESRI’s Arc Explorer, or GRASS are examples of free programs. ESRI’s Arc GIS is a very powerful program, but it is not free.

Some open-source or free GIS programs are:

 

How does this relate to you?

Local knowledge and understanding are key components of any solution to a community problem. Incorporation of local knowledge into the problem solving process is also a sign of good governance. Many times our problems are spatial in nature. Questions like where is? Or how much? Or how big? are questions that a GIS can help us understand. A GIS can tell us how much parking there is. It can show us were the bus routes are and help us determine if an area of our town is lacking service. If a person has their driveway access blocked by students parking in front of their house, they can take a picture and upload it to Google Earth Panoramio.com. They can also map other opportunities for student parking which are near their home. By combining their local knowledge with the powerful medium of maps, community members can help resolve problems and get more appropriate street signs in their neighborhood. Their actions can result in better access to their home and a safer traffic environment.

 

Parking At OSU

OSU Transit and Parking Services has an interactive website which can help you find a parking solution to fit your needs. You can find it at: http://oregonstate.edu/cw_tools/campusmap/?L[]=6

 

Here is a sample screen shot from OSU’s interactive parking map:

OSU Interactive Parking Map

The image below shows how spatial data can be overalyed on Google Earth to allow us to visualize our world.
Use Google Earth to find parking and plan your commute by clicking on the file below. The file below was created by taking GIS shapefiles and converting them to Google Earth keyhole markup language (kml) file. A special thanks to Dan Van Vliet, the OSU Facilities Services GIS Coordinator for his help.
OSU Parking.kmz

What is going on elsewhere?

UC Berkley Facilities Spatial Data Integration

http://fasdi.berkeley.edu/PandT/parkingview.cfm

Grand Junction, CO online parking meter GIS page:

http://www.ci.grandjct.co.us/CityDeptWebPages/AdministrativeServices/InformationSystems/GIS/LinkedFiles/GIS-HTML/map_parkingmap.html


Meg Stewart at Vassar has a Google Earth Community site in which she makes available Google Earth .kmz files that show campus parking, paved paths and campus roads. Visit her site and open these files in Google Earth on your computer. Go to Meg’s Google site here.

 

Local Parking and Transit Plans Parking and transportation are key components of a community master plan. Below are master plans from OSU, Corvallis, and Benton County. Read them and ask yourself if the three levels of government have goals that are nested and work well with each other.

OSU Master Transit Plan

Corvallis Master Transit Plan

Benton County Master Transit Plan