Every Borough Has a Broadway (live link) juxtaposes street-level images of the Broadways throughout New York City. Is there anything particularly distinct about each Broadway? How does each Broadway change along its length? What makes the Broadway in Brooklyn different from that in Queens?
The images are randomly paired, therefore, the distinction between them is sometimes obvious, but can also be more ambiguous.
Each borough has a street named Broadway. Each is a different length, with Manhattan being the longest. As such, Manhattan appears more frequently, but that frequency isn’t apparent as the streetscape varies greatly along its length.
QGIS was used to generate a set of points along all Broadways in New York, from which two could be randomly selected. The NYCOD street centerline data set was filtered to include only streets named Broadway. Although these streets are quite long, they are constructed from many small line segments, broken at each intersection. Using these individual line segments, the direction could be calculated and added as a new property field. The formula for determining the angle of a line segment was found in a post on GIS Overflow — a discussion board for technical GIS questions. With the angle assigned, nodes were extracted from each segment to generate individual points containing the same property information. These points were then finally exported as a GEOJSON object and used in the random pairing of different Broadways. The Google Streetview API took the coordinates and oriented the camera based on the heading direction.
Next Steps:
- Add specific address information using Google’s Geocoding API.
- Automatically refresh the pair after a set interval.