City of Lewisville Launches New Interactive Map Service

Earlier this week, the City of Lewisville launched its new website design on CityOfLewisville.com, but as of press time for this article, it appears as though the site has reverted to the old design for the time being. Earlier today, the Facebook profile managed by the city staff pointed out that some visitors were having access issues and gave out some tips on how to address it. In case you haven’t heard, it has been a bad day for the internet in general. We’re sure the city's new site design will eventually get up and running.

Lost among all of this, however, is perhaps one of the most impressive new features from the city in a long time: a layered, interactive map of the area. Using Google Maps as a base layer, combined with several sets of Geographic Information Service (GIS) and city data, the map allows the user to compare multiple forms of data in numerous ways. Although still officially in beta (testing) stages, the service should be extremely useful to business owners, potential homeowners, or residents (and writers and readers of the Lewisville Texan Journal, of course).

To access the map, click here. Layers, which can be toggled on or off as needed, include zoning boundaries, school enrollment areas, city service information (i.e. trash and recycling pick-up days), and transportation information. This kind of access should make finding correlations (or the lack thereof) easier than traditional mapping methods.

For an experimental example (which may not work in all browsers), we have overlaid two sets of data, neighborhood crime watches and voting precincts: