Full speed ahead on navigating roading repairs

Collaboration between Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), the Christchurch Transport Operations Centre (CTOC), and the open data community is providing a new sense of direction for travellers in Christchurch.

With much-needed repair work being carried out on damaged roads and horizontal infrastructure, travel routes in the city can change day to day.

"Even if you know your route well, the pace of repair in Christchurch means that new roadwork sites can spring up overnight,” says Canterbury SDI Programme Manager Julian Carver.

“While road work information is available online, and efforts are made to ensure road users are well informed, popular resources like Google maps and in-car navigation systems currently don’t have access to detailed enough data to be helpful.”

LINZ and the CTOC have been working to release road closure and traffic congestion data in a way that makes it possible for these existing journey planning tools to give road users better information, as well as encouraging the development of new route planning apps.

“The CTOC has an open data policy; we want to be to able to provide access to the most up-to-date and accurate travel information available that can be used to create mobile applications and websites to assist all road users in Christchurch,” says CTOC Manager Ryan Cooney.

On December 7, LINZ and the CTOC will run ‘OpenHack Christchurch’ – an event that will raise awareness of the release of this important data and support app developers to begin using it.

“We’ve planned this event with app developers in Canterbury, and they’re excited about this data. The aim is to get new journey planning apps developed, and to encourage existing apps to start using road closures data and real time traffic data by early next year,” Julian says.

"This is an exciting opportunity to demonstrate the value of open data collaboration between government agencies and the public to help solve civic problems using non-personal data released by government.”

The CTOC is a partnership between Christchurch City Council, NZ Transport Agency, and Environment Canterbury.

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