Roach Map: The Useful Guide You Never Want To Think About

Like anything good in life, living in this wonderful city requires sacrifices. The noise, the pollution, the crime, Murray Hill, but perhaps the biggest downside of all is the nuclear-warfare-proof hell-demon we call the cockroach.

When a roach appears on a table at Jean Georges, you know it's hopeless to avoid them. But Roach Map, an interactive map pulling from NY Data Mine, is now up for your perusal. The intensity of red marks the concentration of infestation reports, and sadly the entire city sort of evens out into a dark shade of muscle pink.

How did the brains behind this map create it? Why, it's simple, really:

We wrote a Python script that parses the data set's WebExtract.txt file line-by-line, counting every single result for each ZIP code in New York in our window and every result specifically related to roaches. This script is called roach_parser.py.

Easy.