City Councilwoman Jennifer Kim Introduces Austin Residents to Google Earth Initiative

On the morning of February 16, Jennifer Kim and several city staffers gave a demonstration of how the City of Austin is starting to use Google Earth for visualization of current and future buildings in the downtown business district and the north side of Ladybird Lake. The project is still in its very early stages, and the exact goals weren't yet clear. From public comment, it was evident that people are interested in the following main issues:

Data - where is the data going to come from, who is going to pay for its acquisition and how is the city going to make sure that data used for decision-making in the planning and zoning process is accurate?

Integration - How will this new system be integrated with the existing GIS and public records data?

Access - Google Earth is a heavyweight tool. How will those without the ability to use it at home get the necessary level of access.

Street-level View - From the demo, it looked like the software doesn't do particularly well with street-level views. This could be a problem when trying to visualize the impact of proposed developments to our cityscape.

All in all, Google Earth looks like a very powerful tool that could have a positive impact on the planning and zoning process and the city does have some limited budget allocated to pursuing it, but it sounds like it's going to take a while to get up and running with it.

I would not expect that the city will be acquiring data for our part of town anytime soon, but the tool for creating 3D models itself is openly available (Google Sketchup) and it sounds like it might be possible to pull in some of the city's existing terrain and building footprint data from their website and do our own models, if we are so inclined.