The NYC Boundaries Map is a tool for viewing and querying overlapping administrative boundaries in NYC.
Various governmental bodies at the city, state, and federal level divide NYC's geography into a series of districts. Sometimes these districts are drawn to outline communities that will share common representation (e.g. by a community board, a council member, or a congressional member). Other times these districts are drawn to divide the work of a city agency (e.g. police precincts, fire battilions, and sanitation districts). For the most part, every governmental body divides the city in a different way, and in order to know who to collaborate with around issues in their district, those representing the districts within this governmental body need to know which districts of other governmental boundaries orverlap with their own district. For instance, community boards may want to know which council members to call when a pressing issue faces their district so need to know which council districts overlap with their community district. A council member running on a platform of school reform will need to know which school districts overlap with their council district.
Understanding how administrative boundaries overlap is also important for interpreting city datasets and summarizing information across multiple geographies. Sometimes, within city datasets, values are reported at a district level. For instance, DSNY reports the monthly tonnage of waste collected for each sanitation district in NYC. In order to get a sense of how much waste is collected within a community district, an analyst would need to better understand how community districts overlap with sanitation districts. In this particular example, community districts share the same boundaries as sanitation districts, so it is possible to know how much waste is collected per community district. However, when districts do not share the same boundaries, it becomes much more difficult to know how much of the value to allocate to each overlapping boundary. Boundaries Map helps visualize this issue.
npm installnpm run dev and visit localhost:3000In the following section, we define the terms that will be used throughout this document.
Administrative Boundary: a geospatial representation of NYC divided into a series of districts in order to organize administrative work at the City, State, or Federal level District: one division of an administrative boundary District Unique Identifier: a number or name to uniquely identify a district
Most of the data for Boundaries Map is stored in BetaNYC's Carto account.
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We use Carto.js to create and style map layers from data stored in the BetaNYC Carto account.
When users enter a text address into the location search field, the system queries GeoSearch for the lat/lon of that location. The map re-centers to this lat/lon.
We use the Fetch API for browser-based Web requests to the Carto SQL API and the GeoSearch API.
[22] A script to download and aggregate all boundaries to 'all_bounds.geojson'
[30] Reverted back to scroll wheel for zooming
[26] Switched GeoClient API to Planning Lab's GeoSearch for address autocomplete
[29] Added ZipCodes layer and Refactored Code to use a single Carto dataset
Please see license file for details.
Contact Zhi Keng He or Noel Hidalgo.