Expanding to new city: Teaneck, NJ

[jonfroehlich]

We are working with our Oradell team on expanding into nearby Teaneck, NJ. In the fall, we plan to work with a local high school team for auditing. So, we should:

• Figure out the boundary data for Teaneck (where did we get it for Oradell, do you remember?)
• Decide how/if to split it up. I found this ward and election district map here. This would work well but it's a PDF (note, we don't need the parcel data, just the geographic breakdown of districts/wards)

I also found a GIS parcel viewer of Bergen County but this doesn't seem to have exactly what we need.

Thoughts @misaugstad?

[jonfroehlich]

@misaugstad Slack'd to say that we previously got the Oradell geometry from an official New Jersey state government website (here) but that we manually partitioned Oradell ourselves.

Perhaps we can use the ward districts shared above for Teaneck unless our collaborators have a better idea (and something that, perhaps, better matches "folk knowledge" rather than political elections).

[jonfroehlich]

Somewhat relatedly, the Oradell folks are also interested in us mapping the sidewalks on all of the county roads in Bergen County.

This list of county roads in Bergen County is useful. Hopefully, we can extract those roads from OpenStreetMaps for our tool.

[jonfroehlich]

Here's the CADD data file for Teaneck sent to us from a teanecknj.gov employee who said:

NAD 83 coordinate system was used for this map. This map can easily be used as a base map for ARCGIS.

Teaneck Overall Map (all sheets).zip

[jonfroehlich]

OK, the Teaneck folks just emailed to say the want to host a mapathon on August 14th... is this doable? It strikes me as challenging given all that we have going on (but perhaps possible if the boundary data and backend setup isn't too difficult).

@misaugstad, have you had a chance to check the CADD file for Teaneck?

[yeisenberg]

Can ask Devon tomorrow. She may be able to lead that. is this for training the future trainers of other raters?

[jonfroehlich]

I converted the .dwg file to ArcGIS shape files using https://www.gisconvert.com/ (I also tried https://mygeodata.cloud/conversion but our file size of 7MB exceeded the free conversion threshold).

The tool outputted three layers: lines, points, and polygons, which I then visualized in QGIS. To me, these do not look like neighborhood boundaries:

Here's just the polygons and line layers—looks more like commercial/residential real-estate plots vs. neighborhood boundaries

So, I don't think the data is what we want.

Here's the converted DWG to shape files.
teaneck_converted_dwg_to_shapefiles.zip

[jonfroehlich]

Teaneck folks got back to us with a new dataset (this time as a .shp file) but it's still not exactly what we want.

Here's the data file:
Teaneck_Parcel_2023.zip

I emailed Teaneck back and they said we will have to go through Bergen County. I asked for a contact there.

@misaugstad do you think this shape file could be manipulated to extract the boundary demarcations we want? Or would it be easier just to get a geometry for Teaneck and make our own rough neighborhood boundaries...

[jonfroehlich]

I also found the New Jersey Geographic Information Network (https://njgin.nj.gov/) since the New Jersey Data Hub (https://data.nj.gov/) doesn't seem to have what we want.

The NJ GIN has lots of great GIS data but again, couldn't find exactly what we need. I did find the superset GIS file for Bergen County Parcels (colored in green below with the Teaneck .shp file colored in orange)

[jonfroehlich]

A Teaneck city official just sent us to this site (https://www.teanecknj.gov/teaneck-maps) but it only has PDFs:

[jonfroehlich]

Just asked said Teaneck official for more computer-readable formats like ArcGIS shape files or GeoJSON....

Essentially, we want a shape file of all the Teaneck districts in this PDF: https://www.teanecknj.gov/media/Residents/Maps/Teaneck-Polling%20locations%202022.pdf

[misaugstad]

It sounds like our current contact doesn't have anything like this, and is directing us to the county. Note that in the worst case, I can try to hand draw the district boundaries in QGIS using the PDF map as a reference.

[jonfroehlich]

Yah, I was thinking similarly given that we did something like that in Oradell.

Could you use the GIS data that we received to get the Teaneck outer boundary and then hand slice in the "district" boundaries (more or less).

[misaugstad]

I don't specifically remember if the data on the boundary of the city was provided an easily accessible, but I assume that it was. There is also probably an OSM dataset with the city boundary data, though it may be outdated. I've used this site in the past to get the boundary of the city.

[jonfroehlich]

How easy would it be to just extract the boundary data from this? #3254 (comment)

[jonfroehlich]

Update. With the help of the Teaneck MIS Technical Assistant, I think we have what we want from: https://njogis-newjersey.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/764362ac87254d77b976a080f926a6fe_0/explore?filters=eyJNVU5fTkFNRSI6WyJUZWFuZWNrIFRvd25zaGlwIl19

Screenshot below:

Now we just need to have names for them (as naming them D12, D18, etc. doesn't seem very user friendly)

[jonfroehlich]

OK, I was able to load this data into QGIS and confirm it's what we want.

Here's boundary data in GeoJSON for the Teaneck election districts (compressed in zip format):
Teaneck Only - Election_Districts_for_New_Jersey.zip

Here's all of the election districts in New Jersey (also GeoJSON but compressed with 7-zip format to get under 25MB):
Election_Districts_for_New_Jersey Full.zip

You can get the original files, including ArcGIS shape files, from:
https://njogis-newjersey.opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/764362ac87254d77b976a080f926a6fe_0/explore?filters=eyJNVU5fTkFNRSI6WyJUZWFuZWNrIFRvd25zaGlwIl19

[misaugstad]

Thank you!!

[misaugstad]

closing via #3367