HVTechFest'21 Hackathon - Transportation Data Project

The third Hudson Valley Tech Hackathon was held virtually on October 29-30th on Zoom and Discord. The theme was ‘Digital Collaboration/Using Open Data For Social Good’ and our Hackers really took that and ran with it!

The ‘Best GIS Hack’ prize was won by the “Transportation Data Project” team made up of Dev Shah, Alexander Lizzo (Marist college), Connor McCormack (Poughkeepsie), Eric Zheng, and Kyle Gilbert (Syracuse)! They created a tool that would help local municipalities to assist, and small business owners choose the best location for their business to succeed. Using Open Data, R-Code, and Python they interpreted traffic data into a useful and accessible form that people could use to see the amounts, and types, of traffic in any specific area. Business owners could use this to determine if a location is right for them and if they would get enough clientele there and make informed decisions. This is an impressive project that utilized different perspectives to view data and is very proficient in coding and transforming that data into a usable format!