Evaluating a City’s Public Service Infrastructure Based on Online Data

Abstract

The paper deals with evaluation of the quality of public service infrastructure in the city of Kronstadt, the historical part of Saint-Petersburg agglomeration. Public services are considered as FMCG, cultural and recreational venues people use in everyday life. We consider the quality of public services through a set of objective (availability, accessibility, variability) and subjective (users perception) indicators. We measure the quality of public service infrastructure based on the data from open digital sources, such as Technical Passports of Houses from Open Data of Saint-Petersburg Platform, Google Maps, Google Places, and validate usability of services based on a sociological survey. We illustrate our analysis with maps which provide a detailed view on the localization, accessibility, variability of the service infrastructure. We conclude that public service infrastructure in Kronstadt does not address the needs of the dormitory areas which make up one third of all citizens of the city.