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Comment by steven777400 | Hacker News Reader

Not trying to nitpick, but at least a tiny sliver of this data is misleading: the Amtrak stations markers include locations that are definitely not passenger rail stations. For example, the map shows a half-dozen dots on the southwest Washington state coast, but the only western Washington passenger rail service is up and down I-5, and then eastbound from there.

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Hey there, I was involved in making these maps.

You're absolutely correct. We used point data from BTS (http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...), and did not filter out non-train station types.

We're fixing this now.

I'm curious what software you and other media agencies use to make the maps (ESRI?) and how they manage their GIS data (any enterprise GIS software or just a bunch of shapefiles sitting on a network share)? Do they actively collect datasets or just pull it in as needed?

We use QGIS at the Post, which is open source. For organizing shapefiles, we don't really use anything fancy, just a shared folder. If we find something very useful, we put it in there.

Awesome, it's great to see QGIS getting more popular.

Thanks for the reply!

QGIS is amazing to be frank. I'm glad it's working out for you guys!

We love QGIS. Open source for life!

Awesome you use OSS. I love QGIS and PostGIS!

PostGIS is awesome. I was only exposed to ESRI at university (ArcIMS) and can still remember how I felt when someone told me I could have a world-class spatial engine for free.

ESRI/ArcServer is just too expensive for smaller organisations especially once you add in the cost of licensing SQL Server or Oracle.

> ESRI/ArcServer is just too expensive for smaller organisations especially once you add in the cost of licensing SQL Server or Oracle.

I spent most of a year 2yrs ago trying to sell support for QGIS and PostGIS and GIS support in general to local municipalities but that died a very slow death as I had no idea how to sell to any government agency :(

Based on some arms-length interactions with the USGS, my impression is that they use ESRI stuff for basically everything spatial. Ditto for my city I think. The extent of the ESRI monopoly/entrenchment in government is maddening to me considering the licensing costs, the high quality of the open-source alternatives, and the fact that I'm footing the bill. When I was taking some GIS classes at a public university I wondered out loud if the classes would be about GIS or about "using ESRI products". When I inquired about having students learn to do the work with QGIS there was some hemming and hawing and "well we really don't know much about open source tools" and I got handed an install image of ArcGIS. I feel like I paid about 1/2 of my tuition to learn GIS fundamentals and the other 1/2 to pay for training on ESRI products.

Most places don't have anything, they make requests through their engineer and have no access to the data themselves. I also wanted to consolidate things like property records.

But yeah, everyone who had a set up was ESRI :( Arc works with PostGIS, supposedly.

I'm not sure QGIS is quite ready for your average municipal GIS user yet. I did 6 years at a city and was involved with a regional GIS users group - it was an odd mix of people trained in geospatial sciences (geography/forestry etc) and people who had attended a couple of ESRI classes after they were told to learn GIS - ArcGIS desktop is a more visually refined experience especially if you are used to the windows world. Likewise with PostGIS - SQL is a scary tool for many GIS staff. It's frustrating in some ways but also a sign of job security for the immediate future!

I work for an organization with several GIS groups and there is a strong push to get everyone under the IT umbrella. When I see the sums of money IT are looking to pay for ArcGIS Server/Portal/Online + database licensing I see a LOT of potential developer hours being burned up in licensing. Sadly many IT shops strongly favour COTS solutions and ESRI are the Microsoft of the GIS world....

I was using qgis for power users (who could use arc I'd they wished since it can connect to PostGIS databases, but I wouldn't sell or support it).

For everyone else I had a really nice, slick web interface. You could make basic additions, edits, or lookups from it.

I also would be interested in how people organize vector datasets. Between GRASS, shapefiles, postgres, and geojson files (the four types of file storage I utilize most often) I find keeping organized to require an unusual amount of effort. I've looked into CKAN for datasets I want to share, but haven't taken the leap yet and wonder if it will just add to the complexity instead of reducing it.

Why is there no nuclear in the power plant maps?

I'm wondering this as well. Is there no data available, or was it a political/editorial decision?

Wikipedia doesn't seem to have trouble showing their locations, and there are a hundred of them currently in operation, producing just shy of a fifth of our country's electrical power. Given those facts, it is a curious omission, to say the least.

Seriously. Nuclear plants make up 60% of the US' carbon free electricity and (as you say) 20% of its generated electricity. Very curious omission indeed.

FWIW on the Bloomberg Terminal all these types of infrastructure can be played with as interactive map layers. Nuclear, refineries, pipelines, etc., so the data is definitely available and not "secret" by any means.

Yeah, the Energy Information Agency publishes their locations:

http://www.eia.gov/state/maps.cfm

There's a layer there for Nuclear plants too, so it is easy to adjust the map to only show them.

Maybe security? Because if we publish maps of nuclear power plants people might use them to get the bomb?

Not that I agree with that. A simple Google search would be sufficient for someone just looking for a location.

They have linked to another article with more details

Mapping how the United States generates its electricity - https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plant...

In case you plan on updating these, I would love love love an overlay to add in state lines. For example, it appears that it would be technically possible to run a train from my hometown of Carbondale, IL to Saint Louis (blows my mind that it's not a thing) but putting in the overlay and being able to zoom and pretend make that route would be awesome.

This can be prototyped pretty quickly using Leaflet to serve the zoom-able tile map and topojson to reduce the size of the overlay data (in this case, train tracks and stations). I haven't tried topojson for a map of the lower 48, but I was getting a 80% reduction in data file size when using it on parcel data. This way, instead of rolling your own tile layer with the data which is a little bit of an involved process, you can just load a topojson file with the data and draw it as a vector layer.

I'm sure there are limitations that make this much more difficult than I'm expressing due to the volume of traffic that hits washingtonpost.com - I'm more remarking on this so if other people are looking to do data visualizations like this they know there is a good dynamic option out there they can try.

http://leafletjs.com/ https://github.com/topojson/topojson

I thought they included it for the freight network (IIRC the overwhelming majority of train traffic in the US is freight).

It would be nice to distinguish the two.

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