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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

This is really fascinating use of city data. I’ve browsed stuff like sidewalk data in the NYC open data portal before and wondered what I could ever do with it. You have a better imagination than me!

Particularly happy to see scaffolding listed in there. It’s an absolute blight on the city and some scaffolding remains up for years and years for no good reason. There should be fines for leaving it up.

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There is a good reason though, right? My understanding is that local ordinances require very frequent window inspections (following a highly publicized death), so to perform those inspections they need the scaffolding to protect the under-walking pedestrians from the inspectors. Because they are so frequent, it's cheaper to just leave the scaffolding up and take it down and put it up for every inspection.

With drones becoming more common and robust, though, it will hopefully soon be easier and faster to do the inspections and so the scaffolding may become cheaper to remove and replace each cycle

The inspection rules are kind of extreme, supported by the people who do the work and the scaffold companies. Once you “start work” (put up the scaffolding) the clock stops. You see buildings with scaffolding for years with little to non actual work.

No, it’s because putting up scaffolding is cheaper than actually performing facade repairs. Inspections are only every five years.

https://thehustle.co/originals/why-so-many-new-york-city-sid...

Good point about the scaffolding. I stayed for a few days in the financial district last year and walking around outside the hotel felt like being underground.

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