[REQUEST] Paris website

[golf1052]

This question has come up once before from someone in an adjacent city. I've put some thought into it as it would be nice to support other cities but there's some open questions that would need to be answered.

• Who would run other cities?
  • I'm very involved with running the website and social accounts. Uploading reports at least once a week which includes
  • Ensuring there's actually a car stopped in a painted or protected bike lane
  • Ensuring the number of cars reported is correct
  • Validating the GPS point (if there is one) and intersection
  • If it's a report from social media finding the intersection (this can take a while!)
  • Also fixing any bugs I or others run into and responding to people on social media. I wouldn't want other city sites to be unmaintained by their owners
• Stick with the subdomain model or have a single domain that serves the whole globe?
  • The seattle subdomain was specifically used to have a future for bellevue.carinbikelane.com or paris.carinbikelane.com. It would definitely simplify things though for users if there was one domain where everyone made submissions. If subdomains were used in a multi city model having the main domain contain a map with all reports across the globe for viewing would be nice.
• Hosting costs?
  • Currently I'm running the site using monthly Azure credits on my personal Azure account so I don't currently have any costs for the site. The costs average around $40 a month currently. It would probably be a lot to ask a new city site owner to pay this cost right when they start their site. I'd assume other cities would run on a donation model to support their costs.
• What updates would be needed to support multiple sites?
  • Besides secrets and the infrastructure setup, everything needed for someone to fork this repo and run their own version now already exists. There's even a contributing doc which contains most of the info needed to set the site up. If someone did that on their own I would be glad to assist with figuring out what infrastructure settings I used and which secrets go where.
  • If a city wanted to have multiple admins that could upload reports I would want to improve the admin page. Right now it only uses basic authentication meaning there's only 1 password for the entire admin backend. A multi user system should support user accounts so that actions done by different admins could be tracked and audited.
  • As mentioned above there's still more manual work involved than I would like. The best case scenario for an uploaded report is that when I look at the picture I know that it matches the reverse geocoded intersection. When this happens I can just click upload on the report. This probably happens 90% of the time. Improving that rate would be good for new admins to reduce the amount of work they need to do.
• Would a new city's website help improve biking in that city?
  • I created the site in response to Seattle's Even Better Bike Lanes pilot program because the city said they would take suggestions on what lanes should be improved. Having a central community collected data source is great for this purpose. For other cities, while it's cathartic to document an incident of a car or moving van or delivery truck blocking or driving down a bike lane it would also be nice to use the data collected to have actionable steps to reducing those incidents. I expect improvements in Seattle to take years but I wouldn't have built the site if there wasn't a plan to improve things in the first place. I can totally see this site being used in other cities to document a problem to spur government officials into action. I wouldn't say no to a new city site if it's first goal was just to document incidents and go from there but having improvement goals would be nice.

This should be a discussion to try and figure out answers to all these questions (more questions is also good!) if I will be heavily involved in setting up a new city site. If you or others you know want to just fork the site and setup a Paris site on your own please feel free and I would be glad to help with answering questions and getting the paris.carinbikelane.com subdomain working correctly.

[aminamos]

I'm not sure if they support locations outside of the US, but theoretically this may be a good fit for https://www.bikelaneuprising.com/maps

They have a similar mission and vision on mobility advocacy, pushing forward policy, making local connections, etc.