Internship Blog 3: Mid-Semester Check-In

Recently I've finally been starting to explore the GIS part of my job more. I attended a training led by our GIS team for Cityworks, a GIS platform for service requests, inspections, and maintenance. I also talked to the GIS team about their systems and goals within our department and how I can be a part of that. They showed me a lot of very useful city maps in ArcGIS Online of existing sidewalks, planned federally- or state-funded large sidewalk projects, and sidewalk condition ratings.

I’m currently testing a new method for drawing sidewalk plans using feature classes instead of graphics, which would make it easier to integrate updated sidewalk designs into the existing feature class mapping all the sidewalks in the city. The GIS team suggested this method to me, and I was excited to get to do more with GIS instead of just drawing shapes on a map with graphics. However, I’m having some difficulties reconciling the way sidewalks are drawn and divided into features in this layer with the simpler sketches that I need to give to contractors. My supervisor and I agreed that we probably need to go back to separating my sketches for contractors from the GIS data aspect of sidewalks.

A layout I made for a sidewalk replacement project using our old method of graphics

My favorite part of my job so far is doing sidewalk inspections. I am responsible for choosing my list of sites to inspect (within certain parameters) and when to inspect them. Driving to different sidewalks has been a great way to get to know new neighborhoods in Richmond and gives me a concrete sense of how the pedestrian experience varies in the city depending on the urban environment and the condition of the sidewalks. I enjoy matching my on-the-ground experiences to GIS maps and expanding my digital and mental maps of the city to include multiple layers of geographic data and scales.

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