So-called smart cities have an achilles heel: data is biased by the status quo Streetsblog recently highlighted a new report from Houston’s Kinder Institute, evaluating bike and pedestrian road safety based on user-reported near misses.
The hidden bias of big data Read Post »
We confess: we’re data geeks. We love data that shows how cities work, and that give depth and precision to our understanding of policy problems. But truth be told, most data we — and other
Counting People and Cars: Placemeter Read Post »
We’ve received many questions on how we did the analysis behind our Storefront Index. This post will describe our dataset, our method, and how we created our visualizations. We hope that this will spur future
How we did the Storefront Index Read Post »
This week, we’re running a three-part series on the flawed way that we measure housing affordability. This post looks at exactly what’s wrong with one of the most common ways we determine what “affordable” means. Tomorrow, we’ll
The way we measure housing affordability is broken Read Post »
A story published by the Washington Post’s Wonkblog last week made the headline claim that “The McMansion is back, and bigger than ever.” The article says that new homes are an average of 1,000 feet
Misleading Medians & the McMansion Mirage Read Post »
At CityObservatory, we strive to make data the driving force behind our operations. We know that many of you share our keen interest in digging through the data, and we strongly believe that everyone benefits
