Bloomington, Indiana developers inRoads - a digital service to show road, sidewalk and parking status information
inRoads is a digital service developed by the City of Bloomington to manage and publish road, sidewalk and parking status information including closings, lane reductions, reservations and more.
Kenmerken
inRoads is an open source and responsive web application that provides not only current information about road events, but future planned events as well.
inRoads was developed in-house and the city has made the code public so others can adapt the code to their own needs.
inRoads is written in PHP and utilizes Google's Calendar API and the Open Layers library for map rendering.
Samenvatting
Bloomington, Indiana prides itself on being on the cutting edge of smart city development. One of the city’s major focuses has been implementing a library of mobile apps which make life easier for its citizens. Some of these include U-Report, where city officials can directly solicit both individual and aggregated data on citizen concerns, and DoubleMap GPS, where residents can view the real-time status of any city bus, along with route schedule information.
The latest addition to Bloomington’s repertoire of technology is inRoads, a road status information tool. Users can see current and future road closings, lane reductions, and sidewalk repairs. Citizens have the ability to sort information via map or calendar views, depending on how they need to use the data.
inRoads also publishes information about construction and road projects that affect travel. For example, the ongoing I-69 construction causes regular road closings, and this information is pushed to the public via the mobile application. Because Bloomington has such a large commuter base, utilizing city data in this way has proved to be a tremendous benefit to local residents.
The app is based on open-source PHP code and was developed by the city itself. It leverages several existing technologies, such as the Open Layers library for map rendering and Google’s Calendar for keeping track of events affecting road access. Bloomington has made the code public so other cities can benefit from the technology and adapt it to their own unique circumstances.
The source code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington/inRoads. inRoads data is exportable from the application in multiple standard formats.