Boston Big Belly Trashcans

The City of Boston has placed a number of Big Belly Trashcan around the City that are able to the report their fullness, and compact the trash within themselves. These bins have the ability to compress to be one-fifth the volume that it would be if uncompacted. As of 2014, Boston was tracking 525 Big Belly Trashcans placed around the city.

Manipulating Maps

You can zoom in on the map by using your mouse wheel over the map area. You can pan by click dragging, and hovering over a neighboorhood or bin location will show information about the item.
It is pretty clear to see that there is a large disparity in bin distribution from one neighboorhood to another. The table above shows the breakdown even more explicitely. The vast majority of bins are placed in Downtown, while other neighboorhoods have hardly any. The most visible gap in this map is Roxbury, where you can see the line of bins from both the South End and Fenway stop abruptly right at the border of Roxbury. Two bins do actually land within Roxbury, however as they are just on the boundry, it very well could be that their position is actually within another neighborhood. Longwood has a similar effect, the bins from Mission Hill stop just before Longwood begins. As we move farther away from the city center, the number of bins does fall precipitiously as we enter more residential zones. The downtown is actually so densely filled with bins that you can nearly make out each street, and recognize the area even when zoom in.

About the Data

The neighborhood of each bin was determined algorithmically with a point-and-polygon analysis run in qgis. When hovering over a bin, which are represented as a blue dot in the map, you will see the description of the bin that the city has written, these are raw, I have not modified them at all, one of them even expresses that they aren't quite sure where the bin is exactly. Pretty clearly this textual description is the approximate address that the bin has been places at. For references to where the GIS data and other data was found, please see the bottom of the page.

Animation Controls




About Controls

This map allows for the entire year of 2014 to be visualized in trashcan data. The play/pause enables and disables the animation of the data from one alert to another. However a specific month and day can be jumped to in order to analyze a specific point in time using the date editor. The animation speed can be controlled with the slider. Note, the smaller the number of milliseconds on the slider, the faster the animation will go. In most browsers, you will be able to select a field in the date-picker, and using the arrow keys in order to scroll through the data month by month.

About Visualization

All of the bins are initialized to a 'blue' state, this is for two reasons, first, I have no idea what the state of the bin was before Janaury First, 2014, and second, the bin may not have been placed yet. The list of bins that I have available to me for 2014 does not specify when the bin was initially placed, but can sometimes be inferred from the visualization. A bin reports 'green' when it has been emptied. A 'green' status symbolizes that the bin is empty. A 'yellow' status means that the bin is about half full. And a 'red' bin means that the bin is full, and should be emptied.
The data itself shows a few interesting things. First, you can see that Beacon Hill most likely did not have its bins placed at the beginning of the year, and instead recieved its bins around the end of March as that is when the bins go 'green' for the first time.
At nearly any point in the animation, a gross majority of the points are 'green'. Each bin tends to be emptied in 3 days or less no matter which part of the city the bin has been placed in. Also it is not uncommon for a bin to be emptied when it is 'yellow', which seems to be a mild under utilization of the system, but I suppose it is better than the alternative. That being said, these bins have such a high capacity because of their compactors that they should be cheaper for the city to operate due to the less frequent need for emptying, but when empty prematurely they likely prove not as cost effect over a long period of time. And as such, they may not pay off their initial investment very quickly, if ever.

Data Sources

Information about Big Belly Bins themselves has been retrieved from Big Belly's Website in the press kit package. Additionally, the City of Boston's Data Portal furnished the Big Belly Logs and locations.
The Shapefile that has been adapted for these visualizations has also been sourced from the Boston Data Portal. The site has been prepared with d3, and Typescript. Using PureCss, and Font-Awesome for styling.

Created By,
Devon Herlitz