Google Map of Montreal construction zones

As if underscoring how much spare time I have, I’ve tinkered over the past few weeks with some data that the city has put out about planned road construction this summer. A copy of the PDF listing the projects is on The Gazette’s site. They used it to create a searchable database of the projects, which intern Megan Martin introduced in Friday’s paper. My approach (which began before I knew my paper’s online department had a similar idea) was to just dump the data into Google Maps and see what kind of overall map emerged. It involved a lot of cutting and pasting and a lot of tweaking, but I just finished it now.

View Montreal construction 2009 in a larger map

A few caveats about the map:

1. It only lists projects that are planned, not emergency repairs or secret spy operations
2. It only lists projects that are in the city of Montreal, not those in on-island demerged suburbs
3. It doesn’t list highway projects, which are controlled by the province (the Bonaventure Expressway project is the exception) UPDATE: I’ve added some highway projects from the MTQ site
4. It only lists road reconstruction (orange, red) and water main/sewer work (blue) done by the city, not work on buried electrical cables (Hydro-Québec), gas lines (Gaz Métropolitain), cable lines (Videotron), phone lines (Bell) or other things that might require public and private companies tearing up the asphalt
5. There are no start and end dates listed, and many of these projects are carried over from last year – some might not even get started before the snow starts falling again.

In case you want to play with the data, improve on it, do a mashup or plaster it all over your wall, you can download the KML file here.