Downtown Minneapolis Map Collection

[twincitizen]

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/parking/parking_maps

I found this collection of downtown area maps on the City's website . I thought you guys might find it interesting or useful.

[Visualizer]

Not bad. Wish they offered editor-friendly vector formats (like svg) as well.

[woofner]

I'm not sure if we are still allowed to complain about the hallowed City of Minneapolis and its valiant phalanx of dedicated, professional, ruggedly handsome public servants, but I can't resist quoting something from the page twincitizen linked to:

The maps included on this site were created by Jim Dahlseid, City of Minneapolis Traffic & Parking Services Division.

One might find this curious in light of the fact that the City also has a GIS department:

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/maps/about_maps_gis-main

Apparently one of the City's tentacles finds the services of another tentacle so unappealing, either in price or quality, that it chooses instead to reproduce those services itself. I know that this forum in addition to armchair planners, architects, and traffic engineers, also boasts armchair economists, one of whom may be able to explain the concept of perverse outcomes.

[MNdible]

Why are my ears burning all of a sudden?

[Nick]

I'm not sure if we are still allowed to complain about the hallowed City of Minneapolis and its valiant phalanx of dedicated, professional, ruggedly handsome public servants, but I can't resist quoting something from the page twincitizen linked to:

The maps included on this site were created by Jim Dahlseid, City of Minneapolis Traffic & Parking Services Division.

One might find this curious in light of the fact that the City also has a GIS department:

http://www.minneapolismn.gov/maps/about_maps_gis-main

Apparently one of the City's tentacles finds the services of another tentacle so unappealing, either in price or quality, that it chooses instead to reproduce those services itself. I know that this forum in addition to armchair planners, architects, and traffic engineers, also boasts armchair economists, one of whom may be able to explain the concept of perverse outcomes.

For what it's worth, the vast majority of city employees (confusingly) make no distinction between the words department/division/section/office/etc (or, for that matter, supervisor/manager/director/etc) and so a lot of time the things you see and hear about bureaucracy aren't 100% what they appear to be at first. For example, there is no GIS department, a list of departments can be found here. GIS is (probably?) a division/section/office/etc with the Information Technology Department, which in that link is listed with its old name, Business Information Services. There are employees who kind of split time between departments and work on projects that have to do with multiple departments.

Having worked for a couple different large organizations in my life, most people have a tendency to label individual functions as "departments", which is then interpreted as some big thing with lots of desks and ringing phones and carts with papers and whatnot, when really, it's just the one person you're talking to on the phone.

Which isn't to say that the specific example you're talking about isn't actually an example of overlap, because I have no idea, but I felt like clarifying.

[woofner]

OK I'll amend my sentence to read "... the City has an office consisting of multiple employees whose express purpose is to provide city employees with mapping services."

[Nick]

OK I'll amend my sentence to read "... the City has an office consisting of multiple employees whose express purpose is to provide city employees with mapping services."

Well, and again, not to have specific examples, but for example, there was a person who may/may not have been in my department who was basically transferred over the course of about two years from my department to IT. For most of that time they were technically on our department's payroll but were effectively in IT, and they did stuff like, for example, GIS mapping. So...you know.

[woofner]

Just to take this way further than it needs to go, I'd encourage you to look at the maps. They're not bad maps, but as someone who does GIS poorly but professionally, I'd guess that they were not created using ArcGIS (basically the only GIS software and certainly what the Mpls GIS office uses). It appears they were manually drawn or traced using a graphics editor, which made it easier perhaps to create the negative space effect they were looking for in the public right-of-way, but also introduced numerous small errors in geography.

Obviously there could be a number of reasons for this to have happened, but it's clear that there is an office with a specialized function that's being reproduced outside of that office. Perhaps you disagree, but that is not typically an ideal administrative arrangement.

[Nick]

I think it's clear that I mostly just wanted a reason to post that clip from Brazil.