City Set to Begin Street Inventory
By Jon Whiten • Aug 10th, 2009 • Category: Blog, News
In coming weeks, you might see an unfamiliar white van with mounted cameras driving slowly down city streets. It’s not Google, and it’s not the feds fishing around for more evidence. It’s a project the city is undertaking to help manage the city infrastructure.
“This project is part of an ongoing initiative that started with the redrawing and digitization of our City’s tax maps,” Mayor Jerramiah Healy said in a statement. “A complete inventory of city streets will contribute toward the full integration of information from most, if not all, city departments and divisions.”
In particular, the van is collecting images that will be used by the City Clerk and city traffic engineers to complete a revision of the Jersey City Traffic Code. In order to reissue the code, the city has to correlate the location and existence of every traffic sign with a city ordinance. To that end, the van’s four cameras will capture and geocode images every 25 feet.
The data collected will also be integrated with the city’s Geographical Information System (GIS), and the images will also be used by the Department of Public Works, Division of Engineering, Division of Planning, and will be shared with the Municipal Utilities Authority.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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