Austin publishes a few thousand datasets at data.austintexas.gov. Most of them are
spreadsheets nobody opens. A handful carry coordinates, and those are the interesting ones —
they describe the city as a physical place, hour by hour. This page stitches a dozen of them — from
both the Socrata portal and the city's GeoHub — onto
one map and lets you cross-reference them against who actually lives where.
Live traffic incidents — dx9v-zd7x, refreshed by APD/ATD every few minutes. Pulsing pins are still open right now.
311 service requests — xwdj-i9he. Potholes, loose dogs, dead animals,
noise complaints. These do carry coordinates, so the breakdown of what people are calling
about can be scoped to a real bounding box or a radius around you.
Issued construction permits — 3syk-w9eu, with job valuation and contractor.
Crashes — y2wy-tgr5, the Vision Zero record. Runs a couple of weeks behind.
Live fire incidents — wpu4-x69d, the same CTECC dispatch feed
as the traffic layer, refreshed every five minutes. Fire, rescue and hazmat; no medical
calls, which the city withholds under HIPAA. Pulsing pins are still open right now.
Power outages — Austin Energy, through the KUBRA feed behind
their public outage map. It reports by ZIP rather than by outage, so the shapes are the
51 ZIPs they serve and the counts are joined in the browser; only the ZIPs actually out
are drawn. Customers out, customers served and a restoration estimate where there is one.
Refreshed every five minutes against a source that republishes every ten. This is the
one feed on the page with no archive behind it — the city publishes a map of what
is true now and never writes it down — so a scheduled job in this repo has been
recording it since 8 September 2026 to build the history that otherwise would not
exist.
APD crime reports — fdj4-gpfu, 2.7 million of them going back to
2003. This one carries no coordinates at all — only a council district and a census
block group, which is why it shades those units rather than dropping pins. All the counting
happens on Socrata's side.
Fire stations, libraries, public art, traffic cameras — i8r8-6nhk, tc36-hn4j, uuk6-933w, b4k4-adkb.
Council district boundaries + demographics — w3v2-cj58 and puux-7swp, simplified and joined ahead of time so the shading is instant.
Census block groups, tree canopy and urban heat — the Tree Equity Score layer on
Austin's GeoHub, the city's ArcGIS side, separate from the Socrata portal. 644 block
groups, each carrying population, canopy cover and a summer surface-temperature reading
against the city average. It's the only public source that puts all three in one place, and
it's what lets this map shade 644 units instead of 10.
Parks, trails, floodplain, low-water crossings — also GeoHub, server-simplified into
static files ahead of time.
Street condition — 28,006 segments, each graded A–F by Public Works off a
measured roughness index. The drawable layer is the heavy one here, so it only loads if you
ask for it; the per-area averages behind the two street metrics are joined to the block
groups at build time and cost nothing to use.
Time — nothing extra is fetched to play a window back. Every point already
carries its timestamp, so the scrubber is a filter. The layers don't share a clock, though:
traffic is live to the minute while crashes stop wherever Vision Zero last published, so
each layer sweeps the same relative position through its own range rather than pretending
to one timeline. Anything without a clock — stations, libraries, art, cameras, and
every ground shape — is standing infrastructure and stays put.
Live congestion — TomTom raster flow tiles, optional and off unless a
key is set. It sits deliberately under the APD/ATD dispatch pins, because traffic
on its own is something every phone already has — the jam next to the wreck causing it
is not. TomTom is the one vendor whose terms allow their traffic over someone else's
basemap; Google's renders only on a Google map and their terms forbid it elsewhere, which
would have meant discarding everything this page is built on.
Rain and cloud — raster tiles from Iowa State's mesonet cache:
the NOAA NEXRAD composite for rain, GOES East infrared for cloud. Free, no key,
five-minute cache, and both sit under everything else because they are backdrop — the
question is what is happening under the weather. Infrared rather than visible
satellite on purpose: visible light is reflected sunlight, so that product is black for half
of every day, and cloud at 2am is exactly when you would want to look.
Current conditions — the Camp Mabry station (KATT) through
api.weather.gov, which is the central Austin reading the city itself quotes, falling back to
Austin-Bergstrom if it goes quiet. It rides in the news ticker every few headlines rather
than in a bar of its own.
Weather alerts — api.weather.gov, the National Weather Service's own
feed. Free, no key, and the only non-Austin source on the page. Every alert carries FIPS
county codes whether or not it ships a polygon, which is what scopes it to Travis and its
neighbors; warnings draw their real polygon, advisories that name only zones get the county
outline instead, drawn dashed to mark the difference. Refreshed every three minutes. Most of
the time there is nothing, and the section stays out of the way.
Your own location, if you tap the crosshair — read from the browser's geolocation
API, used to work out which block group you're standing in, and never sent anywhere. There
is no server here to send it to, and nothing is written to storage; close the tab and it's
gone.
The per 10,000 residents shading is the part worth playing with. Raw counts just find the
dense places. Normalizing by population surfaces where something is genuinely out of proportion
to how many people live there — and at block-group resolution you watch it change street by
street instead of across a tenth of the city.
Caveats worth knowing. 311 records reflect who calls 311, not where problems are. Crash data
lags. Fire incidents are geocoded to the response area, not a doorstep. Demographics are the
2022 profile built on the 2020 census, so they age against everything else here.
And per-capita rates break downtown: a block group with 200 residents and 40,000 daily
workers will always look catastrophic per resident. The choropleth is shaded by rank rather
than by raw value for exactly that reason — one runaway unit would otherwise render the
whole city black — and the legend carries the real numbers.
One worth trying for yourself rather than taking on trust: shade the districts by
percent of streets graded D or F and then by median household income. The
pattern is messier than you would guess — downtown has the worst pavement in the city
despite the money, because pavement follows traffic volume as much as it follows spending.
Everything on this page is a link, so whatever you find you can send to someone.