If the answer to both questions is “yes”, and you are willing to help by giving us feedback, we’d love to hear from you. We’re doing some improvements on the neighborhood boundaries that we released in January of 2008.
For example, in Philadelphia (where Diane and I just attended the RE BarCamp), we have two sets of maps to go from — one from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System site, and the other is from the Philadelphia City Planning Commission. Both seem to be fairly official sources, but the maps are quite different; the City Planning Commission’s map breaks an area into smaller neighborhoods than those described in the PNIS map. Here are the Philadelphia files (each broken down into North and South to be more legible):
For those in the Philadelphia area, which one is more accurate? Are there any neighborhoods on the maps that just don’t exist in real life? Are there some with the wrong boundary lines?
Philadelphia is just one of the cities we are working on. We’re looking for any feedback we can get, whether we currently have neighborhood boundaries in your city or not. If we don’t currently have neighborhoods in your city, we’d love to add them if we find a good source for that data.
Once we’ve made our improvements and pushed them to the live site, we’ll also update the shapefiles available for anyone to use via a creative commons license, which a few companies such as Walk Score, Zilpy, TeachStreet, and Curbed have already integrated into their sites.
Can you help provide feedback about boundaries in your area? If you provide quality feedback — like a map or specific feedback on what’s right or wrong and why (not just a rant) — we will award you a Local Expert Badge. To give feedback, just leave a comment on this post and we’ll reach out to you offline for feedback. Thanks!