Hello Everyone!

My name is Alex Oestreicher. I am currently in my fourth year of my Geomatics major at Carleton University (Ottawa, ON). My background is largely in Geology, but after I discovered GIS in my 2nd year, I knew I had found my true calling.

I was referred to the ECCE program by my honor’s thesis supervisor, and I am really grateful for that. I hope to learn even more about what is going on “under the hood” so to speak with ESRI products, and learn to make custom web-apps using the ArcGIS Javascript API, as well as setting up GIS back-end solutions using ArcGIS Enterprise. The chance to get some experience with ArcGIS Enterprise and other ESRI back-end products for free through the ECCE program is an incredible opportunity that I intend to take full advantage of.

My work as of late has mostly been in the form of transit modeling. this summer I worked in a student position with the City of Ottawa municipal government in the GIS and Data Management department, and most of my current projects are associated with them in some fashion. I am currently in the finishing stages of building a bicycle level of traffic stress (LTS) map using the Methodology created by the Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose State University. This involved the integration of several datasets (both internal and external) into one cohesive, routable network, as well as a fair bit of scripting in ArcPy (to perform the classification, as well as pre-process the data for easier integration).

Another project I am working on, which directly ties in with my Honor’s Thesis, is a detailed, high quality pedestrian network of the city. I have been working closely with the Community Planning unit for this project. While I plan to expand the network to the entire city limits, for now I have been focusing on the area around the planned second phase of the Ottawa light rail expansion. This is useful to the planners in that they can calculate, in isolation, the effects of proposed path infrastructure on the pedestrian accessibility to the phase 2 stations. It can help them determine which projects provide the most “bang for buck” in terms of accessibility, and also provide them with an indication of potential areas for new infrastructure.

I plan on using the pedestrian network in my honor’s thesis (along with location and place data from the google places API) to perform an analysis of spatial accessibility equity for the city.

I look forward to reading up on the many different projects that other members of the ECCE program are working on and seeing what other kinds of interesting and useful things are made possible through ESRI products.