11/12/2022 0 Comments Bokeh chicago![]() One script, for example, would check to see whether a residential parking permit ticket was valid by comparing a ticket's address against a set of streets and its ranges found on. After unix-by-default I moved on to Python, where I made a small batch of surprisingly powerful, but scraggly scripts. This method worked well enough for small one-off checks, but for anything else, it's a complete mess of sed and awk statements. With the data at hand, I started throwing many, many unix one liners and gnuplot at the problem. #Bokeh chicago trial#That work and its research led to my very first FOIA request, where after some trial and error, received the records for 14m parking tickets. So instead, I started working on a similar goal to programatically find invalid tickets in Chicago. WBEZ in particular released a fairly large dataset of towing data that, while it was a compelling dataset, it unfortunately ultimately wasn't useful for my little project. When I first started, I mostly just worked with some already publicly available datasets previously released by several news organizations. The hunch started based on what I'd seen from the recent "Open Gov" movement in to start making data open to the public by default. The more I thought about it, the more I started wondering why Chicago's court system only favors those who have the time and resources to go to court and started wondering if it was possible to automate these checks myself using historical data. Surely Chicago has some process in place within its $200 million ticketing system to make sure it's not giving out invalid tickets. And what bothered me more was that there isn't some sort of sorts automated check. For whatever reason, though, I'm too stubborn for that - I couldn't get over the fact that Chicago didn't just spend five minutes checking the ticket before I appeared in court. They explained that the ticket itself "didn't have enough information", but besides that I wasn't told much! The judge then signed a form that allowed the release of my car at zero cost.Īt this point, I'd imagine most folk would just walk away with some frustration, but would be overall happy and move on. When I arrived in the court room, I was immediately pulled aside by a city employee and was told that my case was being thrown out. That same day, I scheduled a court date for the following day. The next day I confirmed the lack of permits by calling Chicago's permit office - they mentioned they only thing found was a canceled construction permit by Comed. As luck would have it, the address that my car was towed at had zero open construction permits, which seemed like a good reason to throw out the fines. After some digging, I found a dataset on which details every street closure, including closures for construction. That's obviously a lot of money, so the night I noticed the car was towed, I began looking for ways to get the ticket thrown out in court. The cost to get the car out was quoted at around $700 through tow fees and storage fees that increase each day by $35. Enjoy! Project Beginningsīack in 2014, while on vacation, my car was towed for allegedly being in a construction zone. Also - please don't hesitate to share harsh criticism or suggestions. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy this post and find it interesting. If you're here just to play around with a cool app, click here. In many ways, this work is the foundation for my interest in public records and transparency, so it has a very special place in my heart. Hi there! In this post, I want to show off a fun little web app I made for visualizing parking tickets in Chicago, but because I've spent so much time on the overall project, I figured I'd share the story that got me to this point. ![]()
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