Buildout

The City of Utrecht Planning video still has me thinking. I wonder if it's possible to using a city zoning to create a 'maximum building envelope' from a zoning code, and display it using Google Earth? Just using the '3d buildings tool' in Google Earth is not sufficient--building a city a building at a time is enormously time consuming. To be efficient, it would need to be possible to do using geodata like shapefiles--A tabular format that you could edit and upload, so the 'city plan' can be updated and changed.

What gets built next

This video is interesting. It shows the location and form of future construction in the city. Looking at, the idea of doing the same thing for transportation projects springs to mind--effectively an animation of phased implementation. WFRC currently breaks things up into 3 phases (short, medium, long) which is probably more politically palatable. But it would be really interesting to see when different transportation projects come online.

Mapping the World

According to Time, in an effort to be the center of the Google Earth world, the city of Nanaimo (British Columbia) has put just about of every bit of public data available in Google Earth Format. Pretty nifty way of presenting maps to the the general world. Although it has some limitations-- as someone in the Time article put it:

"For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool," he added. "But, to be fair, if you've been living here your whole life like I have, you don't need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain."

Which brings up two interesting points:

1. Technology is irrelevant unless it is used.
2. If locals aren't the primary users of geo-data, who is the geo-data being generated for?  

Still the idea of being able to track where each fire truck is is interesting. I only wish they had implemented it for buses.