Data Sources
There are an abundance of open data sources available online in a range of topics related to transportation, housing, energy, environment, and many other aspects of urbanism. Here, you will find some examples of open data sources that previous students have used in their projects or that are widely used in research. These are great places to start when developing project ideas, but represent just a tiny sample of the open data available online. It is worth digging around online to find interesting and unique datasets!
Open Administrative Data
Most large cities, counties and even regions in California and throughout the U.S. have data portals that make data on a wide variety of topics available to the public. The nature and extent of data available varies widely, and is changing quickly. New data portals are cropping up all the time.
Transportation Data
GTFS (general transit feed specification) is the most common format for transit data in the U.S. Many transit operators make their data publicly available. Here are a few examples:
Environmental and Health Data
Private Sector Data
Increasingly, private companies are making some of their data available through APIs. Webscraping, a technique taught in the course, can also be a useful tool for obtaining data from online platforms. When using APIs and/or webscraping, it is important that you ensure you are in compliance with the company's terms and conditions. It is illegal to scrape some sites and to do certain things with data obtained from APIs.