Need to know if you have to move your car for street cleaning or where your nearest block party is this weekend? Now you can check it all out on your local NYC neighborhood website.
Every neighborhood in the city will soon have its own site under the .nyc domain where you’ll be able to see public transport delays, ongoing construction, pending restaurant licenses on an interactive map.
The suite of sites won’t officially launch until 2016 but if you go to neighborhood.nyc and type in your local area you’ll see beta versions of the planned guides for URLs like williamsburg.nyc, chelsea.nyc and harlem.nyc.
Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the project earlier this month to help educate New Yorkers about their local neighborhood. “Now, you can find important resources and real-time information about construction, transit, events, and more – all on one easy-to-use online hub,” Mayor de Blasio said in a statement. “It’s easier than ever for New Yorkers to engage with their communities at the touch of a button.”
The websites are created through a public-private partnership between the Mayor's Office and local technology startup and 2014 BigApps winner Vizalytics. Each local guide — there will be more than 400 — will have a desktop and mobile version available in 13 different languages.
Transit alerts, 311 service requests, construction alerts, emergency notifications, event permits, and other city data are all displayed on a neighborhood map so users can see the exact location for each activity.
There’s also a search feature where users can find listings of all the schools, parks, libraries and green markets in the area.
NYC is calling for neighborhood organizations to take ownership of their local domains. Qualified organizations can become administrators of their local site and customize the look and content to best serve the community. Local businesses can also embed the interactive maps into their own sites.
“For the first time, New Yorkers—from any neighborhood in the five boroughs—can access essential community information from dozens of sources on one site”, NYC’s first CTO, Minerva Tantoco said in a statement. “That means fewer clicks and a simpler path to finding out what’s happening in your neighborhood or finding nearby schools, libraries and police precincts.”
