On Saturday, I attended the conclusion of Hubhacks 2 – Visualizing a Thriving, Healthy, and Innovative Boston. As Jascha Franklin-Hodge pointed out, Faneuil Hall was a very appropriate location for the conclusion of this hackathon. As a meeting house, historic Faneuil Hall provided a terrific backdrop for the intersection of old and new, all focused on providing the best possible services to citizens.
With 17 submissions, the judges had a difficult task but ultimately selected three solutions to win prizes:
Biking in Boston
“We were interested in exploring the variability of transit: can we put bounds on how long it takes to make a trip?”
Created by Herb Susmann, Full-stack Developer and Mobile Developer, and Melissa Teng, Front-end Developer and Designer, Biking in Boston factors in variability in travel, combining data from MBTA buses and 1.5 million Hubway rides, showing a distribution of travel times for those planning a travel route.
take out the trash
take out the trash is an initiative created by David Lee, Ian Seiferling, Iva Bojic, Mohammad Vazifeh, and Youjin Shin. The visualization features all the Big Belly trash cans installed in Boston, and one year of alerts sent by those cans condensed into a one-minute animation. Additionally, take out the trash compares the visualization to a hexagonal grid map showing take-out restaurants in Boston, seeking a correlation between trash use and location.
Bike Safety in Boston
A team of coders, data crunchers, and cyclists — Paul Wilson, Andrew Ross, Beth Tenorio and Chris Wand — combined their love of data and cycling to identify areas of both high biking traffic and accidents. Their data visualization includes a sortable interactive map and bar charts to not only plan safer biking routes but to build new bike lanes.
Congrats to all who participated in Hubhacks. We look forward to watching the impact of data visualization on the City of Boston.
