Distribution of the Daniel Morgan Trail System

About a month ago, I was speaking to Liv from The Walking Spartan about, unsurprisingly, walkability and bikeability in our city. In passing, they mentioned being interested in finding the distribution of the Dan across our city council districts. The conversation moved on, but the idea sat with me for a while.

I’ve been sick for the past two days, so instead of working I thought it would be fun to try to figure this out.

Results#

Following our inverted pyramid structure, let’s start with the results.

Data#

District	Council Person	Trail Length (miles)	Percentage (%)
1	Meghan Smith	0	0
2	Rob Rain	2.47	10.13
3	Ruth Littlejohn	2	8.19
4	Jamie Fulmer	4.03	16.52
5	Janie Salley	1.02	4.2
6	Erica Brown	2.2	9.02

Map#

Thoughts#

Savvy readers may have noticed the percents don’t add up to 100. Turns out about 51.93% (~12.67 miles) of the Dan are outside of the city entirely. You’ll also notice that District 1 currently has 0 miles of the Dan. According to the plan¹ shared by PAL, there is future work planned that connects the Three Creeks Trail to Woodland Heights and the Wadsworth Trail.

Somewhat striking too is that District 4 contains 16.52% of the total trail system. It’ll be interesting to see how that changes as the trails get built.

Methodology#

I won’t get too technical here. If you want to dive deep, the code I wrote is on Github. The tricky part of this was figuring out how to pull this data.

Both the city of Spartanburg and PAL have interactive maps which means the data existed somewhere. Using my handy dandy “right-click inspect”, I was able to track down the servers. Turns out, there are GIS servers that expose a basic REST API and GeoPandas can read data directly from the URL. From there it was pretty straightforward to just calculate the length of trail within each district and divide it by the total length of the trail to get each percentage.

I then output the results into a geojson file which I used to create the interactive map embedded above.