Tag: Urban Planning/Transportation/Mobility

City of Yes for Housing Opportunity is a city-wide zoning text amendment that addresses New York City’s housing crisis by making it possible to build a little more housing in every neighborhood. It was adopted by the City Council in December 2024 and is already being put to use to create homes across all five boroughs.

How do legislative changes translate to data changes? How can new and old zoning tools be reflected in land use data? What do people need to know about the City’s tax lots to make informed decisions?

In this session, the Data Engineering team from the NYC Department of City Planning (DCP) will share how the agency added new fields to one of it’s most popular datasets: PLUTO. New fields about Mandatory Inclusionary Housing (MIH) and transit zones will soon be available in PLUTO to give data users a more complete picture of the City’s zoning and land use.

DCP subject matter experts in zoning, housing, and transportation worked with engineers to understand the relevant Zoning Resolution text, the intentions of City of Yes amendments, and the data necessary to relate them to every tax lot in the City. Attendees will learn about the processes, decisions, and surprises that have been a part of this journey through legislation, code, and open data.

Open Data Week 2026 March 22-29, 2026 (and more!)

We’ve all seen construction sites and scaffolding appear in our neighborhood, tried to peek through the cracks and wondered: what are they building over there? This presentation will showcase how publicly available NYC Department of Buildings data can be brought together and deployed to give New Yorkers and industry pros alike a birds eye view on what’s rising up in their communities, all at once and at a glance!

Join Bonnie Stefanick, New Yorker and citizen data scientist, through a high level overview of how the things that get built show up in permitting data using live demonstrations of data sets that capture the permitting process and a daily view of projects happening in NYC neighborhoods, while giving a peek under the hood at the data in action from how it is pulled from the open data APIs and brought to life in tools.

As part of NYC Open Data Week 2026, the CUNY Public Interest Technology (PIT) Lab will host a week-long Open Data Takeover of the NYC PIT Pop-Up at the Oculus / World Trade Center. The activation advances Open Data Week’s goals of accessibility, civic learning, and practical use of open data by bringing open data projects into a highly visible, public-facing space. Attendees can drop in at any time during the hours below for a demonstration of the tool and to speak with the presenter. Most of the demos will also be streamed live from the Pop-Up on its Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/cunypitlab). Inside the Oculus, the Pop-Up is located on the Main Floor C2, in the South Concourse, at Shop #53 (next to M.A.C. Cosmetics). View the full PIT Lab schedule. No RSVP needed, just stop by!

[2pm-6pm]
Masaru Kakutani – From Data to Action: Addressing NYC Winter Heating Complaints with Data Visualization
I want to show how anyone interested in actionable policy can, with the help of generative AI, quickly create convincing stories. This demonstration is designed to help anyone who is interested in generating clear policy suggestions using NYC Data. A standard generative AI will assist in developing policy suggestions, but the template ensures that the AI provides only support, not direction or guidance, for those interested in creating policies.

Lisa Mae Fielder – MTA Performance Metrics
The MTA’s dashboard, metrics.mta.info, which is built entirely off of open data, is going through a major redesign in 2026. We’d like to collect user feedback to better understand features and visuals that the civic tech community would want.

Michael Freedman – crashcount.nyc: an open data tool for safe-streets advocacy
Crashcount.nyc is a public, open-data–driven tool that uses NYC Open Data and AI to document and contextualize traffic crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists, with the goal of supporting safer-streets advocacy at the neighborhood and district level. This session will demonstrate how publicly available NYC datasets—particularly traffic crash data—can be transformed into clear, actionable narratives that help communities understand where traffic violence is increasing and how it relates to policy decisions, street design, and enforcement. The presentation will walk through the structure of Crashcount.nyc, the datasets it relies on, and the design decisions behind presenting complex data in a way that is usable by advocates, journalists, and community members without technical backgrounds.

Open Data Week 2026 March 22-29, 2026 (and more!)

A workshop that uses NYC Open Data to map green space access gaps, not just where parks exist, but who can actually reach them. We’ll identify transit barriers, unsafe pedestrian routes, and vacant lots with conversion potential, then equip participants with concrete tools to turn that analysis into community advocacy.

The core question isn’t whether parks are near enough, it’s whether people can access them. A park two miles away with no bus route might as well not exist for the people who need it most. Participants will learn to map those gaps and identify actionable solutions: Which bus route needs extending? Which vacant lot could become a neighborhood green space? Which crosswalk is missing? This workshop is about democratizing spatial analysis so that communities, not just planners, have the data to advocate for themselves.

By the end, participants will have learned what it takes to create a working map of access gaps in a neighborhood of their choosing, a set of targeted recommendations, and guidance on how to present that data to the decision-makers who can act on it.

This event will be held at the Little Red School House, 272 Avenue of the Americas.

Open Data Week 2026 March 22-29, 2026 (and more!)

In this whirlwind session, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and NYC Department of Transportation (DOT) will take you through a tour of the datasets made available through their agencies’ respective open data programs, and highlight opportunities for analysis that combine datasets from their separate open data portals.

Highlighted datasets include, but are not limited to, pedestrian volumes, bus speeds, and vehicle counts (citywide, from the DOT, and entries to the congestion relief zone, from the MTA). We’ll cover how the data is collected, why the data matters, and interesting things you can find in the datasets.

Come ready to take notes on interesting datasets you may want to use later in a project. You’ll leave the session inspired and ready to take on a new analytics project using open data about mobility! After this event, join DOT, the MTA, and Young Professionals in Transportation for a happy hour.

Open Data Lighting Talk Showcase Hosted by the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation March 23 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm 2 MetroTech Center

Come to the NYC Office of Technology & Innovation offices at 2 MetroTech Center in Downtown Brooklyn for a series of lightning talks, each of which explores how open data interacts with aspects of everyday life. Afterwards, join us for a happy hour a few blocks away at Sound & Fury Brewery and Kitchen (141 Lawrence St, Brooklyn).

These lightning talks will cover projects on the price of groceries, picking public schools, deciding delivery routes, applying to city jobs and compliance for small property owners. Full details of the talks will be added as they get confirmed.

Andre Debuisne “Using Open Data to accurately generate hyperlocal delivery routes in NYC”
Hudson Shipping Co generates its own delivery routes using in-house optimization technology. Part of the input data comes from NYC Open Data, which helps the last-mile operator find the best route for a given day, based on road conditions, planned street closures and many other data points.

Adrian Liang “Applying to NYC’s public high schools by harnessing NYC Open Data resources”
Every year, over 70,000 NYC public middle school students take part in the high school application process. This involves researching and deciding what programs to list on applications from over 900 possible high school program choices. NYC-SIFT aggregates public data from over 20 different datasets found on NYC Open Data and NYC DOE InfoHub. This talk will include a discussion of relevant datasets, how this data is organized, and how students and parents use this data to make informed decisions during the high school application process.

Charles Ludwig “One Search, 4,000+ Careers: Unifying New York’s Public Sector Government Job Market”
Navigating public service careers shouldn’t require checking ten different websites. This talk explores the development of NY Gov Jobs, a unified platform that aggregates over 4,000 active salaried listings across NYC City agencies, New York State, CUNY, SUNY, the MTA, public health systems, and the NYPL. We’ll discuss the technical challenges of normalizing data from multiple jurisdictions and how a single, browser-friendly interface can democratize access to public sector employment.

Shiva Muthiah “PriceWise – A community-built grocery price database for budget-conscious people”
This talk will demo the tool PriceWise (https://www.pricewise.nyc) — a community database of food prices that helps people digitize purchase receipts and draws from NYC Open Data to connect them with stores and neighborhoods. As New Yorkers struggle with inflation, this tool aims to help them work together to pool pricing information.

Parris Taylor “From Transparency to Decision Infrastructure”
New York City has achieved something rare: a deeply structured, publicly accessible regulatory data ecosystem. But access is not the same as usability, and transparency is not the same as prevention. As an operator managing real assets in NYC, I’ve seen how DOB, HPD, FDNY, and DOF datasets remain difficult to operationalize for small property owners. Compliance still requires interpretation, coordination, and judgment across fragmented systems. This session explores how open data can evolve from static reporting to structured decision support. Using Brick, a compliance tool that helps identify regulations, as a case study, we will examine entity resolution across BBL and BIN identifiers and the role of AI in translating public datasets into building-specific risk signals and guided action.

Open Data Week 2026 March 22-29, 2026 (and more!)

New York City agencies create and publish a huge volume of geospatial data each year. They use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – computer-based tools to store, visualize, and analyze this geographic data. This panel will review publicly-available tools and datasets, discuss the state of GIS technology in the city, and consider how the City uses geospatial data to serve NYC residents.  Join this conversation with agency GIS leaders about new maps & tools, geospatial data, and initiatives for 2026.

Moderator
Lee Ilan, NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation

Panelists
Josh Friedman, NYC Emergency Management
Matt Croswell, NYC Department of City Planning
Adam Barin, NYC Mayor’s Office of Operations

Open Data Week 2026 March 22-29, 2026 (and more!)

Unlock the secrets of the city in this interactive data treasure hunt! We will present a series of data-driven prompts guiding attendees through unique statistical signatures found in NYC Open Data covering topics like taxis, crime, schools, and parks. Participants will spend the session solving progressively difficult analytical questions, requiring everything from simple lookups to complex cross-referencing across datasets.

As we discuss the answer to each prompt, a panel of experts from the New York City Chapter of The American Statistical Association will take the investigation one step deeper, presenting a bite-sized lesson on a statistical concept related to the question. Attendees will learn about tools that can be adapted to many other settings, such as distributional thinking, outlier detection, hypothesis testing, and exploratory data analysis. The session culminates in a final puzzle: figuring out the hidden theme that connects all the mystery answers together. This session is ideal for data scientists, students, civic tech enthusiasts, or anyone looking to sharpen their analytical toolkit, open data scientific educational opportunity for all, undergraduate and graduate students very welcome.

The NYC Independent Budget Office (IBO) aims to enhance understanding of New York City’s budget, public policy, and economy through independent, data-driven analysis. In this event, IBO Budget and Policy Analyst Valerie Gudino will showcase how Open Data can be used to analyze and visualize fiscal years 2014-2024 citywide ambulance response times. Valerie will walk through how emergency response and dispatch data can be leveraged to examine patterns in emergency medical response by borough and citywide. This event is ideal for anyone interested in public safety, emergency response or data visualization. Valerie will present the report findings and conclude with a Q&A session.

UnSchool of Data is BetaNYC’s open space unconference for networking, co-creating, and learning. It brings together city residents, technologists, civic leaders, students, advocates, policy nerds, government staff, elected officials, journalists, designers, and more to leverage open data to tackle some of the most pressing issues in NYC and beyond.

It’s a community driven day for turning open data into civic solutions.

UnSchool of Data has these underlying goals:

  1. Convene community members to share civic insights and ideas.
  2. Create processes/projects that people will use for further action.
  3. Foster formal and informal communities of practice and action.

Learn more about UnSchool of Data and how it works at www.schoolofdata.nyc/unschool.