The City of Highland Park has found a new more improved way of tracking Capital Improvements. Historically, Capital Improvements were tracked by the Public Works Engineering Department and were mapped out on a request as needed basis. A static map would be sent to Engineering for their viewing and distributed as desirable but now a virtual map with additional mapping options can be viewed through MapOffice™!
The Capital Improvements are spatially viewable through a Custom Overlay and when the improvement is clicked on in the map, more information appears in a pop-up box. Furthermore, a weblink is available to view PDF’s of the project. This keeps all of the Capital Improvements information stored in one easy to access location and with all the other capabilities of MapOffice™ on hand. This tracking shows that GIS is continuously enhancing and building upon itself. What was once a simple mapping project has developed into an all in one information location system. With just a click of the mouse, Highland Park staff is able to access all of the Capital Improvements, view information on that project and the PDF associated to it. MapOffice™ has become the go to location for spatial information.
The City of Highland Park Police Department and GIS have recently collaborated to introduce Crime Maps for the publics’ viewing purposes. Historically, Highland Park residents would not have the ability to view where crime is occurring in the area. Now, with a click of the mouse they can view month by month maps of crimes in Highland Park.
Each month, data is sent to the GIS staff from Police that includes the addresses and the type of incidents. Using this information, the GIS staff is able to map out each crime location and provide a map product to the department showing crime totals. From there, it is placed on the Highland Park webpage for the public to easily access and view.
Without GIS, it would be increasingly difficult to spatially view crime patterns and understand where problems are occurring in the city. By tracking the crime spatially, the Police Department is able to view possible areas of high incidents.
There has been a recent addition to the Highland Park mapping application, MapOffice™ Advanced! Business Intelligence is a tool that is designed with the community databases such as Firehouse to give the user a dynamic look into map records.
Historically, Firehouse was only viewable through the application itself. Now, the Fire Department employees can quickly and easily display information from Firehouse with MapOffice™! At the tip of their fingers they can view Fire Inspection records for any desired amount of time with multiple searches at once. This dramatically cuts down the time it takes to look up each record in the Firehouse application.
The power of Business Intelligence brings great benefit to the community and empowers the users. With Business Intelligence, the user is capable of looking up a multitude of data at one time.
The City of Highland Park now tracks Road Jurisdictions with the use of GIS! Originally, this data was only visible to staff through a paper map that was printed and delivered to each department. If a resident would call into the Highland Park office asking who maintains there road, they would need to pull out a large paper map with a street index and manually look through the street list to find its jurisdiction. They may have also needed to contact an Engineer for further information. These road maps could also be lost or damaged from use. This process was time intensive and left the resident waiting on a response. With the use of GIS, this process has been drastically improved. No longer does the staff of Highland Park staff need to rely on a large paper map!
Through MapOffice™ Advanced, all Highland Park staff can access the “Road Jurisdiction” layer and visually see who maintains each road. This data was accessed through GIS and brought into MapOffice™ Advanced for Highland Park staff use. Now there is a new custom layer within the “Layers” drop down called “Road Jurisdiction” that when turned on will show the jurisdictions by color code. Red is Highland Park, Purple is Cook County, Green is IDOT and Blue is Private. When a road is clicked on a pop-up window will appear with information pertaining to that road. It is now easy and clear to see who maintains each road.
With GIS, Highland Park staff is able to dramatically cut down the time it would have taken to locate this information on a paper map. With this new change, the residents are benefit from finding out the information faster and with much ease. Finding a Road Jurisdiction is now just a click away for Highland Park!
The City of Highland Park now tracks the Lined Manholes along with Lined Sanitary Sewer. Originally, the information on which manholes in the city are lined was in a database with no visual display. Public Works would need to manually check if a manhole was lined, which was taking up valuable time and resources. This process has now been drastically improved using GIS.
Now through MapOffice™ Advanced, Public Works can easily access the “Lined Sanitary Sewer” layer and visually see what is lined. This data was attained from a Public Works Access Database and brought into GIS by matching the manhole Structure ID’s. Once these were matched up, data such as Date Lined and Material became accessible in GIS. Once this conversion was completed, it was loaded into MapOffice™ Advanced for Highland Park staff use. Now there is a tool where they could turn in on and click on a Lined Manhole and a window will pop up with information pertaining to that manhole.
Without access to GIS software, Highland Park staff would still be manually looking at each manhole to find if it is lined. Through using GIS software, it has drastically cut work time by easily turning on one layer in MapOffice™ Advanced for all the needed Lined Manhole information.
The City of Lake Forest’s Community Development Department recently requested that a GIS layer be created to display Local Historic Districts and Landmarks. Lake Forest is divided into five historical districts, each containing historical landmark properties. Community Development needed a method of knowing where the historical districts were located while simultaneously being able to identify district land parcels that contained historical properties.
In GIS, all Historical Landmark properties were geocoded and displayed over the Historical Districts layer. To avoid having a cluster of geocoded landmark property points, a spatial join was performed to allow users to select a land parcel and quickly identify all landmarks properties that reside on that given parcels. For example, Lake Forest College has 17 campus buildings located on one parcel. Rather than having 17 location points, the location data is stored within the land parcel. Selecting one parcel will allow users to view all buildings/ properties on that selected parcel.
The results of this project allow users an effective method of visualization that avoids map clutter and enables a more legible method of reviewing historical location data. Community Development can use this location data to manage new construction projects within these historical areas.
The City of Highland Park home school boundary definitions are now at their fingertips! Traditionally, whenever there was a question from a resident about which school there child will attend; an employee would need to search through multiple school webpage’s for the answer. This would be a time consuming task for an employee. This process has now been drastically improved using GIS.
Attaining each school boundary definition was completed through using multiple PDF maps posted on each school’s webpage and transferring them into GIS. This was completed for Middle School and Elementary School boundaries for Highland Park. Once these boundaries were defined it was loaded into MapOffice™ Advanced for Highland Park staff use. Now employees had a tool where they could turn on and easily identify where each school’s boundary is defined.
Without access to GIS software, Highland Park staff would still be searching multiple school webpage’s to find school boundaries. Through using GIS software, it has drastically cut the time in searching by created one easy to use source for locating home school boundary definitions.
Traditionally the City maintained benchmark locations in binder containing individual sheets of benchmark locations. Whenever there was a question about the location of a benchmark, an Engineer would search through the binder. The process was slightly improved when the sheets were scanned as PDFs and saved to a directory. It was quicker to search for images in the directory but it was still a manual process to locate a specific image.
The GIS Office suggested that the benchmark locations be converted to a point a file that hyperlinked to the PDF files. The GIS office used the coordinates from the PDFs to create a location for each benchmark. The benchmark points contained a field that links to the correlated PDF. Once the benchmark layer was created, it was added to MapOffice™ Advanced as custom overly. Now the Engineers had a tool where they could type in an address and easily locate the nearest benchmark.
The benchmark overlay was well received by the Engineering Division and they requested that it also be added to the Public Map Office site. This will allow people who need to locate a benchmark to find it themselves without contacting the City. The benchmark layer made The City’s employees workflows more efficient for the City Engineers. Once the benchmarks are on the Public MapOffice it will also make it easier for residents and other users to quickly locate a benchmark.
The City of Highland Park uses the New Application to dispatch Fire and Police units to reported incidents. From the addresses used to accurately respond to incidents to the background layers used in the map, New World relies heavily on GIS information. Without accurate GIS information supplied by the City, the New World application would have difficulty creating accurate responses. One of the most crucial factors in accurate responses are good addresses. This is supplied by the GIS systems as address points and a street centerline. These are regularly reviewed and updated by the GIS Office and other City Employees.
The New World application requires data to be in a specific format with specific fields. The GIS Office wrote a script that efficiently converts the GIS data to required format. The GIS Office also provides support during data by assisting the Police Department with loading the GIS data into New World. Their primary role during this process is resolving data related issues.
Without a robust GIS, the City would have o pay for GIS data provided by a vendor. This data would not be as accurate as data maintained by the City. Also, the City would not have the direct support they currently have during the data updates. Maintaining an accurate and complete GIS ensure that New World is using the best data possible and that it is returning accurate responses. The residents of Highland Park can be assured that their dispatch services will respond efficiently, should they ever need them.
The City of Highland Park Community Development Planning Division is considering the development of a driving tour of John Van Bergen designed structures. The John Van Bergen was important Chicago architect who at one time worked for Frank Lloyd Wright. The Highland Park locations were listed in an Excel worksheet that needed to be located on a map.
The GIS Office used the Excel worksheet to create a map showing the location of the Jon Van Bergen buildings. This map will be used by City employees to create a driving route that efficiently visits most Jon Van Bergen buildings locations. This route with recommended stops will be plotted out on a second map.
By using GIS the Planning Division was able to quickly and efficiently get a map of the John Van Bergen designed buildings. This map will then be used to create a driving tour of these sites. Thus they will be able to showcase an important piece of the history of development in Highland Park. Without GIS the Planners would have had to field check to each location and draw each building on a paper copy of the map.
The Public Works Division is undergoing accreditation over the summer and felt that a tour of the City would be beneficial to the group of people reviewing the Department. The City covers 12 square miles and it would be difficult to people unfamiliar with the community to relate locations to the appropriate part of the City. The tour would include proposed projects and well known locations throughout Highland Park. The tour would start at Public Works, loop around the City and end at Public Works.
The Public Works Department asked the GIS create a map of the stops on the tour as well as the planned route of the tour. GIS quickly created a map showing all 14 stops as well as the proposed route between stops. This map was reviewed several times and the order of the stops were revised to make the stops more efficient.
By using GIS the Public Works Division could quickly create a map that could be easily revised to make the tour more efficient. They also had a nice graphic to assist the review team with understanding where the stops were located throughout the community. Without GIS the City would have created hand drawn maps that would have been difficult to read.
The City of Highland Park is in the process of developing a complete street and non-motorized transportation plan that reflects the best practices for bicycle and pedestrian planning. Revising the plan involves reviewing existing sidewalk, major roads, and other transportation features. The goal of the plan is to ensure the City properly develops a transportation plan that will serve cyclists, pedestrians, disabled transit users as well as users of motorized vehicles.
The Planning Department developed a series map using existing data from the GIS databases. The maps showed existing trails and sidewalks as well as other non-motorized friendly infrastructure. The maps also included Bus routes and an area depicting a 15 minute Bike Ride from downtown Highland Park. The maps were used supplemental material for report on why a complete streets and non-motorized plan was required for The City. The goal of the report was to describe existing infrastructure that was friendly for non-motorized transportation. It goes on to describe how infrastructure could be improved to make it friendlier for non-motorized transportation. Some examples included in the report are adding new sidewalks and adding bicycle lanes to existing roadways.
The Planning Department was able to quickly create most of the maps by using existing GIS data. Thus saving the expense of hiring an outside contractor develops the maps. Because the GIS data updated continuously, it will be also be easy to create updated maps as need
The City of Highland Park is in the process of developing a complete street and non-motorized transportation plan that reflects the best practices for bicycle and pedestrian planning. Revising the plan involves reviewing existing sidewalk, major roads, and other transportation features. The goal of the plan is to ensure the City properly develops a transportation plan that will serve cyclists, pedestrians, disabled transit users as well as users of motorized vehicles.
The Planning Department developed a series map using existing data from the GIS databases. The maps showed existing trails and sidewalks as well as other non-motorized friendly infrastructure. The maps also included Bus routes and an area depicting a 15 minute Bike Ride from downtown Highland Park. The maps were used supplemental material for report on why a complete streets and non-motorized plan was required for The City. The goal of the report was to describe existing infrastructure that was friendly for non-motorized transportation. It goes on to describe how infrastructure could be improved to make it friendlier for non-motorized transportation. Some examples included in the report are adding new sidewalks and adding bicycle lanes to existing roadways.
The Planning Department was able to quickly create most of the maps by using existing GIS data. Thus saving the expense of hiring an outside contractor develops the maps. Because the GIS data updated continuously, it will be also be easy to create updated maps as need
The City of Highland Public Works Forestry Division uses GIS to manage landscape areas maintained by contractors. Traditionally the primary focus was on getting bids for mowing areas. The City Forester created a Mowing Area layer for creating maps and providing square footage values for areas requiring landscaping maintenance to contractors. The City Forester realized that the landscaping areas are actually divided into two types of areas, pervious areas such as grass and gardens and impervious areas such as parking lots and paths. Each of these areas have different maintenance and thus contractors need to know how many square feet pervious and impervious surface were at each landscaping area.
The City Forester contacted the GIS Office about dividing the landscaping areas into pervious and impervious areas to create a table of square footages. The GIS Office accomplished this task by merging all the impervious areas such as roads, parking lots, and sidewalks into one area. This area was then merged with the existing landscape areas so that now had impervious and pervious sections. The City Forester did not want the existing landscape areas divided into separate features. Therefore, the values from the new feature were joined to the table of the existing feature. This provided a feature showing the entire mowing areas that also included the impervious and pervious values of each area.
By using GIS, the City Forester improved the accuracy of information that they provided to contractors biding on City landscaping projects. Without GIS the City Forester would have had to use field checks and estimations to create pervious and impervious values for each landscape area.
The City of Highland Park maintains national and local historic districts layers, which are easy to analyze or map. They did not have an equally easy way to view the location of specific buildings with these historic districts. Community Development Planning Division maintained an Excel worksheet; however these records within spreadsheet did not reference real world locations. The Planning Division recently realized the usefulness of showing the location of the historic building sites within the historic district boundaries.
The Planning division requested that the GIS office use the Excel work sheet create a historical building site layer. The GIS Office used the Excel spreadsheet to create a point layer. This point layer was then used to select specific buildings related to each point. The final product is layer of buildings with historical significance information attached to each structure. It is currently being used as a map layer but there are plans to add to MapOffice™ Advanced as a custom Overlay layer.
Using GIS tools, the City efficiently create a historical building site layer that can assist with studies of existing historic districts. The product will be used as graphic to support discussion of specific properties within or near existing historic districts. It will also be used to identify properties near historic districts that could be included in historic districts. By adding these locations to MapOffice™ Advanced, the Planning Division will make it easier for Inspectors and other employees to reference these locations.
Until recently the City of Highland Park maintained a records based tree inventory within an Oracle database. This application was great for querying information records but it was not good for locating trees within a mapping interface. The Forestry division recognized the need to migrate the database to application that would allow them to use a mapping component. Therefore, they contracted with Davey to purchase TreeKeeper.
There were two important components that required GIS. First the existing tree inventoried needed to be geocoded located. The tree inventory data was geocoded and cleaned up with ESRI ArcGIS software. Ninety-three percent of the over 30,000 tree records were matched automatically. The remaining seven percent were matched to their locations manually. Manually matching the locations as helpful to Forestry as Davey had offered to geocode the records but they would have placed the seven percent in a random location outside of the City boundaries. This meant that Forestry would have had to move 2100 points by themselves. The second step was to export selected layers out of the GIS database to create a base map within the TreeKeeper application.
Without GIS Forestry would not have good locations for seven percent of their tree inventory. They also would not have a good base map for referencing the location of trees. At this point the trees are located on address points, but there are plans to manually move the trees to their real world coordinates.
The Records Clerk for the Police Department is responsible with sending out notices to residents who qualify for Residential Only Parking Permits. These are permits that permit residents to of certain areas to park on specific streets as described in the ordinances. It is important that all the residents who qualify for the permits are notified. Otherwise if they park on the street they will be ticketed.
Previously the address list for each permit was stored in an Excel worksheet. This made it hard to maintain as updates were performed manually. Also, there were no guarantees that they would be notified of address updates. The GIS Office was asked if they could setup an automated process that would generate an address list for each Resident Only Permit. Using GIS software the extent specified for each permit was created as an area. Next areas not designated as a residential zoning district were removed. Finally all the address points within these areas were selected and summarized to remove duplicates. The final product was an Excel Worksheet with a list of addresses for each resident only permit area.
Without access to GIS software, the Police Department would still be using outdated address list stored in Excel. By using GIS software, address list can be generated using the GIS address database which is the master address database for the City. Thus the City will save money by not sending notices to incorrect addresses or have to worry about missing addresses that should be included in a Resident Only Permit area.
Every five years the City of Highland Park must be renew their accreditation with the Commission of Fire Accreditation International (CFAI). This involves gathering a lot of information regarding Fire Department resources such as station response times and resource deployment. It also includes gathering demographic information about the community such as age and population density. The goal of the accreditation review is to assess the City’s Fire Department ability to properly deploy resources.
One report required by CFAI is a breakdown of the types of structures per fire grid. Essentially they are looking for primary structures such as a house or shopping center versus a secondary structure such as a garage or shed. They also want a breakdown of the use for each structure such as residential, commercial, or school. Creating this report requires classifying each structure with a type classification derived from address point information and then assigning it a Zoning District designation as well as a Fire Grid designation to each structure.
The address classification, Zoning District classification, building areas, and Fire Grids were combined into one summary table by using GIS. This table was then summarized by Fire Grid to create a final report of the types of structures for each Fire Grid. Without the availability of GIS, this report would have taken many more man hours and involved several Departments to create an estimate of structures per Fire Grid.
The Office Economic Development is always seeking measures to evaluate the impact of Special Service Area 16 on the economic growth of the Central Business District. It was decided that by reviewing the Assessor information from 2007-2010 it would should show how much owners have improved their properties. The year 2007 was chosen as a starting point, because it was the first year of the Special Service Area.
Lake County Illinois was contacted and they agreed to provide Assessor tables for the years of 2007-2010. GIS software was used to join the assessor table to address points. This provided a history of assessed value of each commercial property within the Central Business District. With these increase or decrease of assessed values for each year was created for each commercial property. Maps were created for each year and for all the years together to assist with visualizing where values where increasing or decreasing.
Comparing assessed values between years was a powerful tool for finding trends. For example we discovered that assessed values generally increased between 2007-2009. But from 2009-2010 the values decreased about 4%. We were also able to see the impact of redevelopment on surrounding properties. It was also predictably noticed that areas of high vacancy had the largest decrease in value.
GIS provided the ability to join multiple tables to each address and then evaluate the difference between the assessed values for each address. Thus creating a mosaic of assessed values in the Central Business District over a 3 year period.
Providing adequate accessible parking spaces for local businesses is an important legal concern for many communities. Failure to meet State and Federal requirements can lead to law suits or having fines accessed against the City. The City of Highland Park Intra-City Parking Committee was concerned that some the parking lots might not contain enough spaces designated as accessible parking spaces.
The GIS Office was contacted to create a series of maps showing the location of accessible parking spaces in the Central Business District and the Ravinia Business District. Using existing data, the GIS Office quickly creates aerial and base map showing all the designations of parking spaces in both business districts. The maps were used to identify parking lots and on-street parking areas that did not have enough accessible parking spots. During the review it was determined that two parking lots required additional accessible parking spaces.
By using GIS the city could quickly review the number of accessible parking spaces with minimal amount of field work. The maps were used by the Committee to make the case that additional accessible parking spaces were needed. Once the additional spaces were created in the field, new maps were created displaying the updated field conditions. Without GIS this parking study would have taken much longer. Each parking lot and on street parking area would need to field surveyed. The information from these field surveys would not be as easy to use or as cleanly displayed as the information in the GIS maps was.
Every year the City contracts with Ayres Associates to update a portion of their base mapping. This is an important part of the process to ensure base mapping reflects real world conditions. An easy way to identify update areas is to look at the when areas were last updated and select the lowest year. This method will select areas of older data but does not necessarily select the areas of greatest change. For example business districts have a higher rate of demolition and new constriction, than do established residential neighborhoods.
The City determined it was more valuable to remap areas of greater change as opposed to areas of older data. For example, it does not really matter if data in a Golf Course area is older because Golf Courses do not change much over time. To determine the areas of greatest change, the GIS Office retrieved permit data from the Tyler Eden application. Permits data related to demolition, new construction, or alterations to existing features were mapped.
The city used the groupings of these permit locations to determine which areas of older mapping areas should be updated. It became obvious that several areas of the 2005 mapping area, should be updated in t he 2011 update cycle. Thus the City will maximize the value of it’s update mapping by ensuring the areas with the most changes are being updated.
Monitoring contaminated soils in right-of-ways and a major concern of local governments. The cost of disposing of contaminated soil is significantly more than dealing with non-contaminated soil. Furthermore, if contaminated soil is accidently mixed with clean soil, the entire pile of soil is considered contaminated and thus the cost of disposing of that soil becomes more expensive.
In the State of Illinois, contaminated areas within right-of-ways are tracked through Highway Authority Agreements. (HAA) These agreements are site plans showing the business that caused the contamination and the location of the area included in the Highway Authority Agreement. The document provides a lot of information, but the document is not referenced with other spatial information. Thus there is no obvious association between the HAA areas and things such as city owned utilities. Therefore, it might be possible for the city to accidently dig up soil in an HAA area without realizing it until after the fact.
Public Works requested that the HAA be added to the existing GIS layers. This way if the City was planning to excavate an area, they could quickly determine if there was HAA area in the planned area of excavation. The GIS Office also added the layer to MapOffice Advanced to provide a quick reference layer. Now, when the City is planning to excavate an area, they no longer have to hunt for an HAA document. They can quickly reference MapOffice Advance or the GIS database to determine of if there is a risk of contaminated soil where they are planning to dig
The City of Highland Park hosts many events from the running races to hosting craft fairs. These events bring many visitors into the community. These visitors will spend money at local businesses and help maintain the local economy. The City relies on GIS to provided detailed maps that allow City Staff to evaluate proposed conditions and make appropriate changes before the event.
Support from GIS can be as basic as displaying the starting area, race route, water station, and ending area for a race event. However, craft fairs and Taste of Highland Park events usually require more complex maps, which show numbered booths, barricades streets, traffic flow, and other detailed information required to plan the event. The GIS support occurs into two to three stages. The first stage is a request for a map or an update to an existing map. The next two to three steps involve review the changes and requesting updates to reflect current concerns. Another advantage of GIS is that the map projects are stored digitally and can be updated annually with a minimal amount of work. Without GIS the maps would have to be recreated each year or updates would be drawn on an older copy of the event map and sent to a graphic designer for updates. In a worst case scenario the City would have to rely on an event map provided by the organizer of the event.
The City leverages GIS to create accurate maps in an efficient manner. Thus the City can ensure events are run safely. City Staff can also quickly make updates to an event map without having to recreate the map.
The Briergate Crossroads Business District is an important commercial center on the west side of Highland Park. It is locate along Deerfield, Old Skokie Rd, and Old Deerfield Rd just west of Skokie Valley Rd. It also contains a variety of other retail establishments such as a grocery store, a toy store, and numerous services orientated businesses.
Over the last six months, the City of Highland Park Office of Economic Development along with the Business and Economic Development Commission reviewed the Briergate Crossroads Business District to identify issues that should be corrected to improve the economic vitality of the district. The first step was reviewing the existing conditions within the district. The first part of the process was requesting maps from the GIS Department which showed the location street lights, signs, ownership of right-of-ways, and ownership of properties. The second part was gathering information from the business owners. Several complaints were indentified and confirmed by reviewing the map.
One of the issues was that lacks of lighting which creates numerous security issues. Another issue is that the district not clearly visible from US 41 and a confusing ramp configuration makes it difficult to access the district. The Office of Economic Development requested that the GIS Office create three new maps showing proposed updates to solve these issues. The first map shows proposed street light locations along streets. The second map shows new signs which will point out the ramps used to access the district and assist drivers with navigating the ramp configuration. The third map shows areas where IDOT will be requested to clear brush to make the district more visible from 41. Using these maps, the committee can show how proposed changes will benefit the business district.
Ensuring that all the hydrants in a community are in a proper working condition is vital for the safety of residents within a community. The city ensures hydrants are working properly by flushing them every summer. Previously, the city contracted ME Simpson Co. to flush hydrants each summer. This year they decided to have the Fire Department perform the flushing of hydrants.
The Fire Department understood the technical aspects of flushing hydrants but they also understood the need for developing an organized process for tracking which hydrant flushing. Furthermore, the hydrant features within the GIS have valuable information from previous hydrant flushing programs. It was important that this information was also updated. The Fire Department met with the GIS and requested three products to assist them with implementing the hydrant flushing program. The first product was an Excel sheet listing the number of hydrants per Fire Grid District. The Excel sheet was used to assign hydrants to three teams, one from each station, who would be assigned specific fire grids. Knowing the number of hydrants per Fire District Grid ensured that each team was assigned approximately the same number of hydrants to flush.
The second and third products are used together to tracking flow rate and pressure information for each hydrant. The hydrant information will be updated in an Excel sheet of hydrants, which were extracted from the GIS. There will also be a map showing the hydrants with a unique Id and address, so that correct hydrant is identified and updated in the Excel sheet. By using GIS the Fire Department leverage resource to help them efficiently manage the summer hydrant flushing program. Thus the community will be protected in two ways. They can be confident that all the hydrants in the community are in proper working order and the Fire Department can access the updated hydrant information in the GIS to understand how well the existing hydrants work.
The Public Works Department annually prepares a Capital Improvement Report. Part of this report is identifying existing facilities owned by the community. This year they wanted to enhance the report by providing maps showing the location of City Owned Infrastructure.
Thus they contacted the GIS Office to create a series of maps showing the location of city owned facilities, parking lots, street lights and traffic signals. The GIS Office created citywide maps showing the locations of all the items for one of the requested assets. Then they created maps which showed close-ups of areas of the city were assets were crowded together. These close up areas made it easier to identify specific assets in crowded locations Because the information for these assets already existed, the maps could be created quickly.
The maps were a valuable addition to the report because they allowed the reader to see where the described assets were located. This assisted the reader with understanding what was being described in the report and where the items were located.
By contacting the GIS Office, the Public Works Department obtained a series of maps which enhanced their report. Also, because the GIS Office could access existing information, the Public Works Department was able to quickly receive these maps. They really liked the maps and they plan to include them in all future Capital Improvement Reports.
Over the last six months the City of Highland Park has experienced an increase in vehicle burglaries. This has led to pressure from residents to reduce the number of vehicle break-ins. The Police Department based on reports and interviews has two people of interest. However, they were looking for a way to confirm their hunches as to which incidents were mostly committed by the suspects from the ones which were truly isolated incidents.
The Police Department asked the GIS Office to create a map of vehicle burglaries. The requested maps showed the location of vehicle break in. The incident locations were colored by the month they occurred in. The symbols were also sized to show how many vehicle break-ins occurred at each location. The final map product was useful not only grouping the incidents by location but establishing time frame when these events occurred. From them map it was easy to see that some of the clusters occurred during a specific month.
All of the suspects were eventually caught and the map is being used as evidence in Court Proceedings. By leveraging the power of GIS the Police Department was able to a product that confirmed some of there hunches as to the some of the incidents being linked. Thus creating a useful piece of evidence for charging the suspects with committing some of the incidents.
Editing data is a traditional task of the GIS Office. However due to heavy project loads the GIS Office can not always keep up with the volume of utility edits. Additionally updates are only published every quarter, so it can take up to three months before employees see updates in the GIS data. This often leads to frustration as employees know there are issues with the data but do not immediately see updates.
Therefore the City decided to purchase a version of ESRI ArcEditor. This software provides the ability to edit the attributes and location of features. It allows the editing of features within a geometric network and thus ensuring that no network errors are created during editing. Two experienced with ESRI ArcView users were trained to edit in ArcEditor.
The trained employees are just beginning to review and edit data. Their first impressions were positive as they were able to correct some major issues they had known about for years. They also plan to add institutional knowledge such as pipe joint types along with other attributes currently not collected by GIS. The GIS Office will continue to update data with records drawing, as well as reviewing the work completed by the Public Works Employees.
The biggest advantage of providing editing capabilities to the Public Works Employees is that edits can be made immediately. It is also quicker as employees can update information directly and skip the step of recording it a field note atlas. This editing ability is expected to be a great cost saver for the community, while greatly improving the accuracy and completeness of the utility data.
The Senior Connector is a bus route which provides free bus transportation for Senior Citizens. The route is funded by the city and included stops at senior residential facilities, retail, and recreational stops. It is an important resource for ensuring the mobility of senior citizens.
Because the City of Highland Park provides all the funding for the Senior Connector, they wanted to evaluate the annual number of riders for each Senior Connector stop to determine if some of the stops should be drooped. One item of interest was adjusting the routes and stops in the Central Business District.
The GIS office was contacted to create two maps. The first map showed the location of each stop with the number of riders. It also showed the direction of the connector traveled from each stop. The map was useful for evaluating the location of each stop and the number of annual riders at each stop. The second map showed the routes through the Central Business District and was useful for evaluating the location of the routes to determine if all the important places were served by the Senior Connector.
By using maps created with GIS, the city had a strong visual tool for evaluating the current status of rider-ship of the Senior Connector. It allowed them to evaluate proposed changes to the Senior Connector route based where seniors were most likely to use the service.
Like many other Fire Departments, the City of Highland Park Fire Department finds itself having to maintain current level of converage with less resources. Determining where to effectively deploy these resources is an important part of maintaining the expected service level. The Fire Department approached the GIS Office about using GIS to evaluate where to locate Department resources and it was decided to create two series of map products.
The first map product used ESRI’s ArcView with the Network Analysis Extension to create maps showing response times in one minute increments from each station to the edge of the community. The response time routes follow the road network and include impediments such as one way streets and stop signs. The goal of these maps was to judge the impact on response times if one of the stations were closed.
The second set of maps displayed Fire Department response data for a period of one year. Various maps were created and categorized by type and or time. These maps helped identify hot spots of Fire Department responses. The goal of these maps was to analyze areas where the Fire Department mostly frequently responded, so that resources could be effectively deployed to respond to these areas in a timely manor.
By using GIS the Fire Department had a powerful tool to assist with adapting to a new reality. They gained the confidence to make difficult choices because they have the information to judge the impact of these decisions. Thus they will be able to maintain their current service level using fewer resources.
Downtown Highland Park is partnership of organizations; including the Downtown Property Owners Association, Highland Park Chamber of Commerce, and the City of Highland Park. The goal of the Downtown Highland Park is to promote existing businesses and to improve the overall economic vitality of downtown Highland Park.
The GIS Office assists the City with supporting the Downtown Highland by providing mapping services. The most often created maps are ones of special events promoted by Downtown Highland Park. The most recent examples of these event maps are the Public Art Installation which showed the proposed location of temporary art displays along Central Ave, and the Holiday 2010 Event Locations which showed two proposed locations for Ice Carving events at Port Clinton Square
GIS also create maps for analysis of current situations in the downtown. Last Spring the GIS Office mapped the responses from a survey of business in the downtown in regards to their satisfaction of the Downtown Highland in supporting it’s goal. Mapping the location of the responses allowed the Downtown Highland Park organization to evaluate if it was adequately serving businesses in all areas of the downtown. The GIS Office also mapped the location of service orientated, retail and vacant units in the downtown. This allowed the city and Downtown Highland Park to understand where different types of businesses were clustered.
The City of Highland Park depends on the GIS Office to create maps to support the various needs of Downtown Highland Park. These maps assist Downtown Highland Park with it’s goals of promoting existing businesses and improving the economic vitality of the downtown.
The City includes a Storm Water Fee with every water bill. The purpose of this fee is to collect money for the maintenance of City Owned storm sewers. The current fee is based solely on the building footprint. Over time it has become apparent that this method is not adequate as it does not include all impervious surfaces. For example a property with a small building and a large parking lot is only charged for a small portion of the storm water that runs off the property and into the city storm sewers.
Therefore it was decided to include Parking lots, sidewalks, and private roads, along with the buildings to ensure that property owners were assessed in a more equitable manner. It also had the benefit of increasing the amount of money collected from Storm Water Utility Fees without increasing the fees themselves.
The Finance Department approached the GIS Office to create imperious values for each parcel and tie them to utility billing accounts. The GIS office created values by merging all impervious features with parcel features. Addresses were used to tie the Utility Billing Accounts with each parcel associated with the utility billing account. Finally a table was created showing the new impervious values with existing impervious values.
The comparison table was created to show how much of the fees would increase if all impervious areas are included. It was also used as a check to verify the accuracy of the GIS data. At this time the new values are not being used, but they are planned to be added by January 2011. By using GIS the city quickly created impervious values for each utility billing account and ensure that storm water fees would be assessed in a fairer manner.
This year the City of Highland Parked moved from doing street sweeping in house to contracting out the service. It was important to provide information to the contractor that showed how often certain streets needed to be swept. For example, curbed streets are swept monthly while uncurbed streets are only swept twice a year. Arterial and other major roads are swept once per week.
The city maintains a GIS layer that contains attributes for 12 sweeping routes. Using this layer, 24 maps showing regular and arterial routes were created. These maps showed the contractor how often each street had to be swept. It also included street names and nearby streets not included in the sweeping routes. This is critical information for contractors who may not be familiar with the local area. The routes and the base layers ensure the contractor can find the streets included in each route.
Using GIS the city had a tool to quickly create a series maps to inform a contractor exactly what was expected. This avoided the extra man required to have employees hand draw the maps and avoided the in accuracy that accompanies hand drawn map. Thus minimizing the chances that street might be missed or that the wrong streets were swept.
The City of Highland Park recently developed a business page for their website. The purpose of the page is to promote Highland Park as a great place to establish new businesses. Providing the location available for commercial leasing is an excellent way to assist a businessperson with locating a good area to start their business.
The Office of Economic Development and the GIS Office worked together to create the base map. The base map shows the location of business district on a Citywide map. The user hovers the mouse pointer over the business district name, which then brings up a pop up bubble describing the business district. If the user clicks on the bubble, it brings up the interactive map showing the location of available commercial space.
The interactive map is created by converting the spreadsheet of available commercial space to a point file. Points are overlaid on a Google map. The user then clicks on the point to receive more information about that location. Thus the user can easily find the available square footage for leasing, contact information, and zoning. Points can also be located from a list of addresses on the left.
Working together the Office of Economic Development and GIS Office created a powerful tool that allows interested parties to quickly find the location of available commercial space. Thus avoiding the need to call the city or individual real estate brokers to determine the location of available commercial space. This streamlines targeting and attracting of future businesses to the area.
The City of Highland Park has an ongoing program to restore ravines in order to prevent further degradations. Some of the issues they are addressing are slope failure, exposed sewer pipes, pollution discharge, and channel scouring. If these are left uncheck the ravines will continue to degrade, thus threatening the stability of nearby structures and increasing the amount of debris dumped into Lake Michigan.
Lack of funding forced the City to reduce the amount of ravine area restored each year. The City decided to apply for several grants from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative program. While a written report is useful, a map of the area is even more valuable. The City Public Works Engineering Division requested that GIS create some maps for the report.
Through GIS, the city created a map that showed the topography around the ravines. Then they added graphics showing existing issues, the extent of previous projects, and proposed new improvements. Using an underlying elevation model, the position of items is better understood in relation to the ravine.
With the help of GIS, the city created maps supported the written statements of what the city wanted to accomplish with the grants. The extent of the maps allowed the city to show it’s ongoing commitment to improve existing ravines and assisting with improving the ecosystem of Lake Michigan.
The Special Service Area 16 came up for it’s first three year review in the Spring of 2010. The City Manager required methods to determine if the Special Service Area had fulfilled it’s goal of maintaining an economically vibrant downtown. He decided that a study of the location units used for retail, services, office, and vacant units would supply the required information
The first part of the project was joint field survey conducted by Engineering and Community Development to determine the first floor uses of each building within the Special Service Area. They walked the entirety of the Special Service Area and record the use of each commercial unit. The survey results were entered into an Excel spreadsheet and given to the GIS Office.
The GIS office reviewed the survey and quickly realized that many buildings have multiple businesses associated with them. Therefore, it was decide to split the buildings into appropriate units and assign the business information to each unit. These units were categorized by commercial use to create three final products, Retail Map, Service and Office Map. The Director of Community Development reviewed the maps and then GIS Office submitted to the City Manger.
By using GIS, the city was able to create maps that showed specific economic activity within the Special Service Area. For example, clusters of vacant and retail-orientated business were found on the maps. These maps are helping the City Manager to make the case that the Special Service Area is successful in maintaining the economic vitality of the Central Business District.
The Tyler Edens application is an important finical and permit enterprise system that allows the city easily track finances and permit status. The application will only function efficiently if it has good base information such as zoning districts, addresses, and owner information. This information is readily available but requires the tools within the GIS to combine this information into one table. The GIS tools also clean up the County provided assessor owner information to assure owners within the city of Highland Park have correct street names. The GIS office annually creates a flattened import file that is used to keep the Edens data current.
A second role of the GIS is providing the layers for the interactive map within Edens. This map shows parcels, buildings, and utilities. By using the map, users scan interactively select properties and see the related records for each property. Thus making workflows more efficient as users do not need to manually search by addresses.
A final support process of the GIS is creating the impervious values for each property. The impervious areas used to asses a storm water fee for water billing customers. Without GIS, the Edens application would not contain much of the valuable information it now contains and would create more frustration for users trying to use the application.
Departments
Planning Building Finance Fire Public Works Engineering City Managers Office
An accurate inventory of sign locations is crucial for keeping roads safe for driving. Missing signs or faded signs can lead to motorists missing important warnings about road hazards.
In 2003, the city hired an intern to collect sign locations throughout the entire community. The sign information entered into an SQL database as posts represented as Arc/Info coverage points. A custom application was created to allow city staff to edit sign record information. In January 2009, the post points and sign records were migrated to a single ESRI SDE database. This allowed City staff the ability to edit post locations and sign records in an ESRI ArcView environment.
By allowing city staff to edit data, update work is added when completed in the field. Supervisors are able to query the database to plan and track sign replacement programs. Employees also select signs by area to create reports and maps for meetings.
By using a GIS to maintain a sign inventory, the city saves many man-hours that would otherwise be used to searching through paper files. They can also quickly produce maps and reports that are impossible with the mapping component of GIS.
Within the GIS, manmade features such as buildings, bridges, railroads, and roads are classified as planimetric data. The city contracts with Ayres Associates to update planimetric features for about twenty-five percent of the City each year. This ensures that none of the base mapping within the city is older than 5 years. Updated base map layers are important to ensure that new construction and redevelopment area are accurately reflected in the base map features.
The base map layers are used to evaluate existing conditions and plan future updates. By having current layers, the City is assured they are making the best and most accurate decisions. Accurate base mapping is only one of the ways that GIS assists the City with making good decisions.
The City of Highland Parks contains a vibrant downtown full of many service-orientated businesses that wish to provide outdoor seating for their customers. The City of Highland Park requires these businesses to apply for a permit, which allows outdoor seating. One of the main purposes of the permit is ensuring that the outdoor seating locations do not cause a public safety hazard by obstructing the pedestrian traffic or by being too close to the street
Part of the permit application process requires the requester to submit a hand drawn map showings were the tables and or chairs are located. They must also diagram a five-foot clear walkway around or through the outdoor seating area. These hand drawn maps create many issues including, legibility, not drawn to scale, and inaccurate measurements. Previously these drawings required field verification by a city employee. These field verification often held up the permit process as the person processing the permit had to wait for verification from the person who checked the site in the field.
In 2006, the City of Highland Park asked the GIS Department to create digital maps for these permits. The GIS approach held many advantages. The five-foot clear walkways were accurately applied to each map. Map symbols representing correct table and chair alignments provide an accurate display of the site setup. Furthermore, the digital maps contain other obstructions, such as planters, lights and trees. By creating the maps in standard scales, users can accurately measure distances on them. Field checks are not longer required to verify the site as most issues are reviewed on the paper copies of the maps
The maps are digital products that are easily updated as businesses makes changes to their outdoor seating areas. Many of the same businesses apply for these permits every Spring. Because the permits contain existing maps from previous years, it removes the cost of creating new maps every year. GIS was effectively used to make previously manually intensive process into a quicker automated and more accurate process.
The City of Highland Park is a vibrant downtown full of businesses that attract many visitors. Because the downtown contains many buildings, it is often difficult to locate a specific business. The Highland Park Chamber of Commence decided to use business directory to aid people with locating specific businesses. There are four directories located throughout the downtown area. They are similar to Shopping Mall Store Directories in that they list a location of a business and provide a map for referencing that location.
The directories consist of two parts. A map displaying important features in the downtown and a business directory listing around the map. A sample of the map is visible on the right. The map consists of orientation information such as address ranges and street names. It also symbolizes the buildings containing listed business and public parking areas. The design allows people to quickly reference business listed in the directory listing.
The second portion of the directory is the business listing; a sample of the business directory is displayed on the left. It lists the business name, map grid location and address. The grid location refers to the letters and numbers on the map. This grid makes it easy to locate a general area on the map. The addresses provide a more precise location within the grid. They also provide a building number to locate the business from outside the building. Businesses are also categorized by similar characteristics to further aid people with finding a specific business
GIS was crucial for developing this product. An automated process assigned the grid locations to each business. The map consists of existing data that colored and labeled by existing attribute, eliminating the need to create separate graphics for these features. The map and directory are produced in house and do not require the cost of a graphic designer to create this product. Furthermore, producing the product in house allows easy and quick updates to the directories. GIS provides the tools to create an important information product of great value to the residents of the City of Highland Park.
The City of Highland Parks runs the Taste of Highland in conjunction with the Port Clinton Art Festival. The Taste of Highland provides an opportunity for local food related establishments to sell food products and allow people to taste their food products. Thus, it is an excellent opportunity for vendors to gain exposure to potential new customers. Both events are important annual events in the greater Chicago area. These events attract hundreds of thousands of people and thus need to be well planned to ensure everyone remains safe, while enjoying themselves at the Taste of Highland Park Event.
Planning for a big event like the Taste of Highland Park requires accurate information regarding the location of event activities and the effect the event on the immediate vicinity. Carolyn Hersch from the City of Highland Park Economic Development requested that the GIS department create some maps to help visualize the location of event related activities.
There were two final products used in event planning. The first map showed the location of the Taste of Highland Park Event Performance Stage. It showed the location of the stage, electric generators, sound booth, and electric lines.
The second map showed the extent of the entire Taste of Highland Park Event. The reader can see a portion of the map in the image on the right side. This map displayed the location barricades for closing streets, The Police Command Center, and other important public safety items. It also showed the location of vendor booths and the location of other things used in support of the overall event. Finally it showed the location of Port Clinton Art Festival booths, to ensure there were no overlapping conflicts between the two events
The Highland Park GIS program provided two highly accurate graphics to assist the Planning of the Taste of Highland Park. Because the products were digital, they were easy to update as the locations of activities move, during the planning and review for the Taste of Highland Park. Through the use of GIS information was efficiently updated and quickly provided to the planners of the event.
The City of Highland Park Department of Community Development Planning Division is in the process of creating a new master plan for the continual development of the Central Business District. Building mass is one of the issues currently under review for this plan. Building mass is the study of size, height. and volume of buildings within an area to gauge the density of commercial and residential use with in that particular area.
The Planning Divisions wants to understand how existing the distribution of mass with in the current structures relates to the overall area of the Central Business District. Of Special concern, are areas that contain low densities of building mass. It may be important to determine if the current building mass distribution under serves these areas. Building mass is also a tool for ensuring that development is occurring equally throughout an area. This avoids situations such as having a downtown with historically low structures ringed by towering condominiums or office buildings.
The Planning Division met with the GIS Department to determine what tools were available to analyze building mass. They determined that using ESRI’s Arc SceneTM application provided the best option. The GIS added all the required layers and extruded the features to create a 3D model. The image shown on the right displays a sample of the final product. As the reader will note it easy to see the mass of each building and quickly locate areas of low building mass. Because the terrain model provides the base elevations, one can even see how the relief of this area affects the building heights.
By using GIS, the Planning Divisions received a good visual product that is useful for visual analysis and as a graphic supporting a report. They are also able to look at building mass in ways that are impossible with paper maps.
The City of Highland is very responsive to residents concerns of basement flooding and sewer backups during heavy rain events. The major issue is storm water infiltration of the wastewater sewers exceeding the wastewater sewer’s carrying capacity. Damaged or aging wastewater laterals are a major source of this infiltration.
In previous years, the city conducted a program that evaluated the conditions of laterals in targeted neighborhoods and required the property owners to repair or replace damaged laterals. Many property owners complained that it was an expensive repair and requested city assistance with paying the cost of these repairs.
The city decided to investigate the cost of assisting with these repairs by assuming ownership of the laterals within the right-of-way. In this way, the city could possibly reduce the repair costs to property owners, by paying to repair the portion of the lateral within the right-of-way. Before proceeding, the city had to know the expense of maintaining the laterals and thus the feasibility of assuming ownership of these laterals. The approximation of expense required an estimation of the linear feet of laterals within the right-of-way.
Because the city does not maintain utility service layers, the estimation of laterals in the right-of-way is a difficult task. The city decided to use the analytical power of GIS tools to create the estimation figures. The process of creating the estimation involved performing a distance analysis from the primary structure to the nearest right-of-way boundary and the nearest sewer. By subtracting distance to the right-of-from the distance to the sewer, the city established an approximate linear feet in the right-of-way. The process involved manual cleanup of anomalies, such as private roads and structures on corners or near the back of lots.
After the completing the cleanup of the distance values, the linear feet in the right-of-way was combined into a final total. This provided the city with reasonable approximation the linear feet within the right-of–way. Using the cost of maintaining a linear foot of lateral with the approximate linear feet of lateral in the right-of-way provides the city a means of creating a final cost evaluation.
The City of Highland Park Fire Department is considering relocating one of their three fire stations where they can build a larger station. Moving this fire station will affect the response times within the community. In order to help understand the extent to which the new fire department will alter the response times, the city enlisted the help of the Geographic Information System (GIS) Department.
The Fire Department contacted the GIS department in order to evaluate the response time network covered by five-minute response areas. The base layer for the response time network consists of a road centerline feature. Information added to this feature including speed limits and one-way restrictions allowed response times to be calculated. Using the formula of 60*length of segment/speed limit, a response time was populated for each segment. The response time is the cost of travelling that segment of road. Placing other restrictions including, turns, stop signs, and prohibited u-turns to model intersections, increased the accuracy of the network.
The next step involved using the response time network to create a series of maps. The first group of maps showed the five-minute response area of the current configuration of fire stations. The second group of maps showed the five-minute response area of the southern fire station to one of two proposed locations. These proposed location maps also showed which properties were no longer within a five-minute response area as well as the new properties added to the five-minute response area of the proposed station location. The final series of maps showed five minute, twenty second, and five minute thirty second response times. These maps demonstrated that many properties removed from the five-minute response areas are still within a reasonable response area from one of the fire stations.
With the creation of the road response network and the related map products, the Fire Department had valuable information for assessing the impact of moving the location of an existing fire station. With this information, the Fire Department is able to show interested parties the impact of relocating one of the fire stations.
The City of Highland Park Fire Department needed to identify specific types of building structures for their International City/County Management Association (ICMA) accreditation. Specifically the ICMA required structure counts of building use, such as residential or commercial, and a classification of the building as a primary or secondary structure. For example, a single family home is a primary structure where as any garages or sheds related to the house are secondary structures.
The fire department decided to use the analytical power of GIS to classify all the buildings within the city of Highland Park. The first step was to apply a classification to each of the buildings. Each structure received a zoning district value by overlaying it with the zoning layer.
Then each building received a use classification of primary or secondary. An automated process placed a primary address point on the largest building at each address. Then the process created secondary points for smaller buildings located at addresses with primary addresses. Because the largest building is not always the primary structure, a manual review was performed to ensure all points were placed on the correct structures.
There are many instances in the City of Highland Park where multi-family homes are mixed in with single-family homes. The multi-family structures were identified by selecting all single-family homes with multiple addresses. A multi-family classification was then given to these structures.
By using existing GIS datasets within the city GIS system, buildings were accurately classified by use and as primary or secondary structures. The fire department received an accurate list of all structures within the city. This allowed the fire department to successfully complete their ICMA accreditation.
The City of Highland Park Manager’s office has recently required the need to visually display each city owned parking lot in a map format and publish these maps to the city’s website. Although their original methodology of publishing PDF maps of these parking lots would initially work, the city believed that the organization of these maps could become confusing when combined with all of the other content on the city’s webpage. After multiple meetings with the Geographic Information System (GIS) Department the city decided the best way to organize the information was to create a Google Map containing a point location for each city owned parking lot. From there, the parking lot data points would then contain all of the necessary space designation counts for each parking lot as well as a link to a corresponding PDF maps. The benefit of doing it this way was to keep all parking lot information centrally located and easy to find.
The first phase of the project involved the creation of PDF maps for each parking lot using existing parking data that was created within the GIS. The maps were then field checked and marked for errors by the local city staff. Once all of field checks were completed the data within the GIS was then edited to reflect what was current in the field and PDF maps of each parking lot were created.
After the PDF maps were finalized, the next step was to create a KML (Key Markup Language) file that could be used to integrate with Google Maps or Google Earth products. The creation of this KML file involved building a model in ESRI’s Arc Catalog application which took existing GIS data and converted it to a usable KML file format. The most important function of this conversion was to ensure that the labels that were used to display the parking lot information in Google Maps were readable in a clear and concise manner.
The first KML point file that was created was tested for functionality within the Google Earth application. Users of this product could click on a desired point and gather information about the total amount of parking spaces in a selected parking lot and what designation was assigned for each parking space. In addition, the Google Earth application allowed for an accessible link to a PDF map for the specific parking lot that was selected as well as the ability to print these PDFs for individual purposes or meeting presentations.
Because Google Earth required each city employee to download an application to their computer it was decided that Google Maps was a better alternative since it worked from any internet browser and allowed the same functionality. The last step was then performed that entailed placing the Google Map link for the parking lots on the city’s web server in order to make it easily accessible to all city employees and residents.
In conclusion, the end result of this project created a more centralized approach to representing the city’s parking structure on the internet allowing it to be an important decision making tool for the Intra-City Parking Commission and the residents of the City of Highland Park. It can also be noted that interdepartmental collaboration between city departments and GIS allowed this project to be a success.
Link: Highland Park Public Parking Map