Hundreds of replies, and not one of them on a map.
Cities run mobility surveys and get hundreds of replies. Every location arrives written as a sentence. “The corner by the school.” “8th Street from one avenue to the next.” Sometimes just “all over the city.” Nobody can put that on a map without reading every row by hand, so the answers sit in a document and the plan gets written from memory.
Dropping a pin and filtering by who a problem affects.
Map © OpenStreetMap · CARTO
A COMMON SIGN OF THE PROBLEM
Request lists usually carry a ranking column - and it is usually empty. Not because nobody cares about priority, but because a spreadsheet gives you no basis for deciding it. There is nothing in the file that says how many people are affected.
Three things change
A request has a location, not a description of one
People pin the spot they mean. Two reports about the same corner land on the same corner, so you can see they are one problem rather than two lines of text that happen to rhyme.
The empty ranking column fills itself
Residents agree with each other’s reports. Priority stops being a guess and becomes a number you can defend in a meeting - and point at when someone asks why this street and not that one.
You can see who isn't being heard
Filter by who a problem affects - people walking, wheeling, cycling, riding the bus - or by neighbourhood. The gaps show up immediately. One district sends thirty replies; the one next to it sends one, and that itself is a finding.
What you take away
Nothing has to stay inside Placehood. Everything comes out as a file that opens in the tools you already use.
export.csv
| location | category | agree | status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8th & Lake | Bike lane or facility | 14 | reviewing |
| School crossing, Oak St | Crosswalk improvement | 9 | planned |
Illustrative rows. Coordinates, dates and the full answer set are in the file too.