This project aims to establish if the movement patterns of the pedestrians alter given a construction venture taking place on the street walk. In this particular situation, the street walk observed is connected with 370 Jay Street. Furthermore, this project also aims to check if the movement patterns are only confined to the sidewalk or additionally in street crossing given the implications the construction work might inflict on the traffic and stoppage.
Procedurally the data were collected only during the day when construction was in motion. Construction work would mostly be active during the day time, consequently, the data collected is during the day time. It also would be inconsistent to register the same movements over nighttime, as there could be other determinants that could direct to a contrasting pattern in the pedestrian movement. The data types in the ArcMap system that I imported in this specific project were raster (image), CSV (external data), several shapefiles for fusing the data. In general GIS systems allow several data types that range from raster to excel tables to vectors, maps, etc. Photos, as well as video recordings, were taken to keep a track of the pedestrians and their locations. However, not all pedestrians carry a geocoordinate as some of them are relative to the nearest neighbor. Say, for a group of friends, only one geocoordinate was recorded, and the rest were marked relative to it. The data collection required a significant period of observation to get a gist of the current movement period. There were five main observation points: 3 of the 5 stars marked locations from where the observations were undertaken.
In primary data analysis, I was able to discover how activity on the street walk could affect heavily in the pedestrian movements. In the above section, I talked as to how activity on street walk commenced to a traffic stoppage which directly had a significant impact on the movement patterns, however, as soon as the construction was suspended, the movements took the normal patterns.
In the secondary data analysis, I fused secondary data on my base map, plotting the pedestrian movements from 370 Jay Street to National Grid building via the crosswalk. This can further be extended to study, say, how often the crosswalk at 370 Jay Street and National Grid is used vs how the crosswalk at 370 Jay Street and Willoughby Street is used.
GIS can aid us even in the smallest of smallest ideas one can come up with. Presumably one might perpetually consider GIS for significant problems, Global Warming, Migration, information exchange, but the ease, feature-richness of GIS is so that a problem(like above) can also be perceived, and if envied can certainly be used to solve certain problems, like the interaction of pedestrians with the dumpsters, their response to the pedestrian walk lights, additionally there is also the scope to understand which buildings are chosen by the populace at a particular time of the day.