Snow & Ice Violation Map

WNYC's Ilya Marritz has a story today about how violations for unshoveled sidewalks reveals what may be the most neglected block in New York City.

Ilya zeroed in on that block because once he got the records from the city, we sorted them using Google Refine.

Tonight I got all of the data on the map in a way I finally like. I started using Google Fusion Tables, but was unhappy with how slow and erratically the map loaded.

Instead, I batch-geocoded the entire data set using this tool and then wrote a little Ruby program that uses a gem called kamel to generate a KML file. I tinkered with the icons and then zipped it into a tiny KMZ file -- just 56K -- which loads in a flash.