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Clarify language
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At Lauren’s request.
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waldoj committed Apr 7, 2016
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Expand Up @@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ Some cities have still other sets available that may be useful, such as:

**Is it unusual that Philadelphia publishes the data necessary to support this?**

Most of the data that has been released in Philadelphia isn't actually geospatial...so, no? In fact, many other cities, including Washington, DC and San Francisco, already publish most of the data you'd need to build something similar via their open data portals. The trick was finding some way to tie the regulations together and refer to existing geometry. Most large cities keep their own canonical data set of streets and their exact geometry (relative to one another), called a centerlines file (sometimes “streets centerlines”). Because hundred blocks often intersect other, smaller blocks, they become subdivided into smaller sections—called street segments.
Most of the data that has been released in Philadelphia isn't actually geospatial...so, no? In fact, many other cities, including Washington, DC and San Francisco, already publish most of the data you'd need to build something similar via their open data portals. The trick was finding some way to tie the regulations together and refer to existing geometry. Most large cities keep their own canonical data set of streets and their exact geometry (relative to one another), called a centerlines file (sometimes “streets centerlines”). Because hundred blocks often intersect other, smaller segments, they become subdivided into smaller sections—called street segments.

I decided to try to use that resolution and join the regulation data I had to each street segment, which each have a unique ID. While it's true that this model doesn't take into account regulations like minimum legal distance you can park from an intersection, it was enough to get started. Philadelphia has over 40,000 street segments; if I needed more detailed information after that I figured it could always be tightened down later.

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