Avencia, an award-winning, Philadelphia-based geographic analysis and software development firm announces the release of Walkshed New York (NY) – a web application that uses advanced technology to calculate and map walkability based on user preferences. Avencia created Walkshed NY as a submission for the NYC BigApps Contest.
A City of New York initiative, the contest solicited software application entries that utilize the city’s recently released NYC Data Mine - a repository of location-based data sets from over two dozen city agencies. Winners will be determined by votes from a panel of judges as well as public votes (public voting takes place December 15 – January 7).
Developed by software developer Aaron Ogle as part of Avencia's 10% research project program, Walkshed NY enables users to make precise and personal walkability calculations for any location in the city. Instead of using "as-the-crow-flies" calculations, Walkshed takes into account the barriers (rivers, highways, etc.) and disconnected street networks that often prevent pedestrians from reaching desirable locations. Walkshed works by using "friction-based" (aka "cost-based") distance calculations in lieu of straight-line distances to reflect the relative ease or difficulty of walking through the streets, and to optimize accuracy. Walkshed friction calculations work by laying a grid of more than 150 million cells over the entire city and determining how much “friction” a pedestrian would encounter for each cell.
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