On May 31st, 2014, Code for Jersey City hosted their first Hackathon as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. The event was organized in partnership with CodeForNewark, a CodeForAmerica brigade from Newark. The challenge was to create public transportation maps for Jersey City and Newark.

The hackathon opened with five great speakers:

  • Russell Jordan & Jennifer Onofrio - Port Authority, PATH
  • Susan Poliwka - Mobility & Planning Division Head at City of Hoboken
  • Alina Tarmu - Graduate Student at Montclair University, mapmaker
  • Preston Reha - Brigade Program Coordinator at CFA
  • Toni Barelli - Bike JC

After eight hours of hard labor, four teams submitted their work:

Central GIS Repository for Hudson County Transit Map Jersey City Interactive Transit Map Jersey City Jitney Map App Ferry Terminals and Icon for Open Street Maps

Our distinguished judges, Candice Osborne and Anthony Townsend chose the two winners!

1st place went to Victoria Nece for “Central GIS Repository for Hudson County Transit Map”:

Victoria created a central GIS repository covering all public transportation services within Hudson County. All data is vector-based and organized into layers by mode of conveyance. Where available the data is tagged with attributes. The project lays the groundwork for bigger projects.

2nd place went to Milen Pavlov for “Jersey City Interactive Transit Map”:

Milen created simulation using schedules data to visualize how communities within Jersey City are serviced. The project is valuable to city officials and can be used to analyze and optimize public transit and ensure all areas of Jersey City get a fair service. The project exposed issues with the officially published GTFS files and we are reaching out to the agencies to resolve those issues. For now, the demo includes only MTA data from New York.

The winners got Xbox 360 + Kinect and 1 year license for SlashDB for first place and $100 cash and half a year license for SlashDB for second place.

By popular demand, we will continue to hold Transit Map hacknights during our regular meetups for the next couple of months.

Check out the official National Day of Civic Hacking to see what other cities did that weekend.