New York City’s Department of City Planning provides a wonderful resource in the LION dataset, which contains lines for streets, paths, railroads, and administrative boundaries. There is one problem with the most recent version– it is only available in ESRI’s proprietary File GeoDatabase (or GDB) format. While the format has some advantages (more on these below), it is not easily accessible in many free/open source tools. I recently had occasion to work on converting LION to a more accessible format for display and light analysis, and this post outlines that methodology and provides the results. Continue reading “Slimming down the LION”