By BRIAN BERGSTEIN The Associated Press
Monday, February 2, 2004; 8:43 AM
NEW YORK - The bureaucratic, pothole-plagued world of big-city government is making creative use of sleek, innovative technology.
Specialized mapping software helped New York plot the addresses of people who had called to complain about having lost their heat during a recent cold snap. That helped determine precisely where the city should set up "heating centers" for New Yorkers to huddle in.
In fact, officials can make a few mouse clicks to see any number of trends swirling in the city of 8 million people: which neighborhoods are low on fire trucks, where the West Nile virus has appeared, or which streets were recently paved and should be off limits to digging.
Other cities too are increasingly using the technology to infuse efficiency and clarity into what would otherwise be simple civic drudgery.
The system, known as the Citywide Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Utility, combines aerial photography, census figures, crime statistics and other information submitted by city agencies and local utilities. Any or all of it can be overlaid on an interactive map that is so detailed it shows curb lines, trees, wires, traffic rules and vehicle height restrictions.
Cities and insurance companies have long produced minutely detailed maps of their realms. And in recent decades, individual agencies in many cities fired up mapping software to track their specific regulatory matters.
But until recently, city agencies and contractors have shared their information in any number of time-consuming ways, including just calling each other by phone.
Newer mapping systems, in contrast, use improvements in computer processing power to blend many different kinds of information from disparate agencies, vastly aiding urban planning.
In New York, for example, fire engine dispatchers generally heard about street closures in an ad hoc fashion - from firefighters who noticed roadblocks while on a grocery run or even while rushing to blazes. Now dispatchers can see street closures directly, by checking what transportation officials have added to the map database on their end.
GIS also has become a powerful homeland security tool.
