After receiving feedback on our poster and presentation at the midterm, we now have a clearer view of what would serve ARC (the Atlanta Regional Commission) best as the final product we create for them. We also got a better sense of how we can host our platform, add a job distribution, and investigate other projects that interest ARC. They are launching initiatives to improve Atlanta’s public transit system, such as a collaboration with Cambridge Systematics to address transit issues related to the elderly and disabled, and a project called MartaMenu that uses MongoDB to help users plan their trips. Our tool compliments these initiatives by giving users (and ARC) a way to interactively view and access how public transit affects job accessibility.
Our tool, the Atlanta Access to Jobs map, displays accessible jobs from a given origin by walking or public transit. Travel times approximate a typical morning commute. The tool allows users to choose their place of origin, transit mode (walking or public transit), and maximum travel time. Jobs accessible from the chosen origin and meeting the selected criteria are marked by an isochrone (the highlighted region on the map). The map representation shows a single point for each job. The jobs are color-coded as red, blue, and green for low, medium, and high pay jobs respectively.
Check out our tool at http://transit.gatech.edu.
The entire code for this tool is available on Github at: https://github.com/Moqri/job_accessibility
We have been heavily inspired and borrowed from other open source mapping tools including:
Peter Richardson’s dotmap of US Census: https://github.com/meetar/dotmap
Dustin Cable’s racial dotmap: https://github.com/unorthodox123/RacialDotMap
Robert Manduca’s jobmaps: https://github.com/rmanduca/jobmaps
We are currently working to add more functionality before we finalize the documentation and packaging to deliver the tool to ARC.