31–40 of 74 posts
This is an unusually nice website, but if you like this, check your own city, they might have one too! For example, here's: DC: https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/e... Boston: https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?... LA: https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm
(the ability to get info on a specific tree seems to be broken)
one thing most people don't realise is how much park and woodland london has.
I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML. While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?
London GDP is about £500 billion. They’ll need this info to maintain the trees in any case. If it cost 100k, it would be 0.02% of GDP. For the difference trees make to urban areas, it would be utterly trivial. If you made £50k cash after tax a year (so closer to 80k before tax), it would be £10 a year, that’s the fraction. Of course it costs far more than £100k to maintain this data.
I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML. While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?
We aren't all poverty stricken, I'm quite happy to commit my 1p share to this website.
Worth noting that these are only the trees that line roads - so quite a few of those dark areas are actually parks and woods crammed with trees.
This is an unusually nice website, but if you like this, check your own city, they might have one too! For example, here's: DC: https://trees.dc.gov/apps/3677bceead544db79a412e3ab0a68588/e... Boston: https://boston.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?... LA: https://losangelesca.treekeepersoftware.com/index.cfm
My https://github.com/simonw/sf-tree-history repo now has 444 commits (most recent one was just 4 days ago) tracking every change that's been made to https://data.sfgov.org/City-Infrastructure/Street-Tree-List/... since March 2019.
I haven't yet done anything with this data, but there is so much potential for visualizations and other fun stuff with it. If anyone wants to have a go please be my guest!
Wrote more about this project here: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Mar/13/tree-history/
I bet this this website cost London £100k or more. They probably contracted it out to some supplier to build and maintain, and they are charging through the nose for hosting it, because the people on the London horticultural team don't do HTML. While I applaud the effort, I do wonder if it is tax money well spent. Perhaps a spreadsheet on a shared drive would have been better value for money?
Keeping track of things is a really necessary function of any council. They have massive asset registers that need to know where everything is, from streetlights, to bins, to bus-stops, not to mention planning. They track anything they are responsible for, because otherwise it's rather hard to be be responsible for it.
That includes street trees, which are the council's responsibility. This is why the London one doesn't include ones in parks, since those are maintained by the Royal Parks people. This is their internal register of trees that someone has slapped a
My local council (Bath and North East Somerset) has a small but excellent data team, and they have an online map with all their data in one place. There are layers for everything, https://www.bathnes.gov.uk/webforms/maps/