A programmer in Cape Town, South Africa has developed a simplified and interractive load shedding map for his city.
Load shedding, or rolling blackout, is an intentionally-engineered electrical power outage . Delivery is stopped for
non-overlapping periods of time over geographical regions.
Johann Du Toit, the developer says his load shedding map is intended to allow Cape Town residents keep up to date with scheduled load shedding plans by ESKOM in a way which is simple and easy to understand, unlike the official load shedding map which is somewhat obfuscated and confusing.
“I was chilling at home and wanted to check how load shedding is going to affect me. I found the official map for Cape Town, but was very confused. Too many numbers for my feeble mind. I thought if I’m struggling with this others are too. So let’s make it cool! I wanted to provide a more visual interactive way to view the schedules that will allow you to still see the same info from the page but immediately be able to use it and get your info.”
And cool is what it is. On the official Cape Town map, you may have to scroll through pages of maps before you get to the information for your own area. On Johann Du Toit’s map, you only need to hover over each time frame to see a list of the impacted areas. Nice.