Comment by ricohageman
6 hours ago
Built a parking garage occupancy tracker for my city (https://www.parkeergaragesdelft.nl/) after a city council decision on car-free city center policies got delayed due to missing data. The city only publishes real-time availability with no historical record, so I started logging it. The site now shows historical data plus analysis of weekly patterns. (Note: website is in Dutch, but the charts should be self-explanatory.)
Now working on a second tool that monitors public reports on illegal dumping, broken streetlights and more. It tracks how long the municipality takes to resolve them
Lately, I've developed an interest in local politics and started reading policy documents, following city council meetings and even lobbied for a local park. Presenting public data clearly can help shape opinions and keeps the city council accountable, especially important with the upcoming city council elections.
This is very cool. And I can imagine sometimes it's not even about keeping them accountable, but demonstrating how easy a solution is to a problem that council bureaucrats would not have the capability to solve - likely have to outsource to a vendor that would charge for 'out of scope'.