(Photo by Christina Estes - KJZZ)

Pavement quality is one of the most popular data sets on Tempe's Open Data Portal.

From the condition of street pavements to emergency response times, people can now find in-depth information about Tempe through a new open data portal. By posting more details on the city’s website, officials hope to spark more community involvement and commercial activity.

Someone might examine zoning or traffic count data to help decide where to start a business. Or, someone might use data about parks and public art installations to create apps for walking and bike tours.

“It looks kind of like what you would see going to a regular search engine site,” said Program Manager Stephanie Deitrick.

She said you can search by topics or check out the most popular datasets, which includes what many people drive, bike and walk on.

“We curate that information and we create like a map view of it so people can see the pavement quality index of specific streets,” Deitrick said. “We provide some summaries of the information. So, overall what’s the quality of different types of streets so like big, like busy streets like University versus a residential street. We provide a little context about what pavement quality means.” 

While Deitrick looks forward to hearing from residents with suggestions on what they’d like to see or ways to improve city services, she admits not everyone will like what they find. 

“Let’s say we have the graffiti data out and someone isn’t happy that we’re showing there’s graffiti around the restaurant,” she said. “So, there’s risk in it, but the exciting part is that when those criticism come back it creates the opportunity to have those conversations.” 

She said no personal information will be posted. The portal currently offers about 40 datasets with more to come.