Depave Fort Lauderdale
This map shows where Fort Lauderdale has the most non-essential pavement in the neighborhoods that stand to benefit most from removing it — a screening tool for turning heat-trapping, runoff-generating asphalt back into living ground.
Why depaving matters
Pavement drives up summertime temperatures, concentrates stormwater runoff during Florida's rainy season, and displaces the tree canopy that would otherwise cool streets and absorb rain. Not all pavement is optional — roads and sidewalks carry essential movement — but parking aprons, oversized driveways, and unused back lots often are. Identifying where that surplus pavement sits, and which neighborhoods bear the greatest environmental burden, is the starting point for a depaving program.
How we identify pavement
We start with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's NAIP aerial imagery — 1-meter, 4-band (red, green, blue, near-infrared) photography flown over Florida every couple of years. A machine-learning classifier (a random forest) learns what pavement looks like by pulling training samples automatically: points along known OpenStreetMap road centerlines are labeled as pavement, building footprints from the Microsoft Global Buildings dataset are labeled as buildings, pixels with strong vegetation index signals are labeled as plants, and known water bodies are labeled as water.
The classifier then labels every pixel in the NAIP imagery across the city. Afterwards we refine the raw output: we burn OpenStreetMap road centerlines back in at realistic lane widths to repair places where tree canopy hid the road from the camera, and we subtract airport footprints so that runways and taxiways — which won't be depaved — don't inflate the numbers. Everything outside the Fort Lauderdale municipal boundary is clipped away.
To separate optional from essential pavement, we compare each piece of pavement against a "core" mask built from road centerlines and sidewalks. For state and federal roads, we use FDOT Roadway Characteristics Inventory data with surveyed surface widths; for local streets, we use OpenStreetMap centerlines with class-based width estimates. Sidewalks are included in the core mask. Parking lots, driveways, and service roads are not — they are depave candidates. Anything inside the core mask is core pavement; anything outside is non-core.
Pavement inside airports and parks is excluded entirely — depaving runways or park paths is outside the scope of this analysis.
How we identify priority areas
For each of the city's 47 census tracts we compute four need scores, each normalized to a 0–1 scale:
- Heat — mean surface temperature from the 2021 NOAA/CAPA heat-mapping campaign.
- Stormwater flood risk — a topographic stormwater proxy derived from lidar: where does water pond, and where does it concentrate when it runs off?
- Canopy deficit — one minus the fraction of the tract covered by tree canopy (University of Miami lidar-derived canopy layer).
- Pavement burden — non-core pavement acres divided by tract area.
We average the four scores into a single composite and flag the top quartile (tracts at or above the 75th percentile) as priority tracts. Overlapping the priority tracts with the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) disadvantaged-community designation highlights the equity hotspots — places where environmental need and historical disinvestment coincide.
Headline findings (approximate — latest pipeline run)
- Approximately 4,919 acres of pavement citywide, of which about 1,976 acres (40%) are non-core and therefore candidates for depaving.
- Approximately 344 acres of pavement inside airports and parks were excluded from the analysis.
- 12 of 47 tracts (about 26%) flagged as priority on the composite needs score.
- 19 tracts are CEJST-designated disadvantaged communities; 8 of those also fall in the priority set — the equity-and-need overlap.
Key caveats
- Pre-screening only. This is a tool for scoping where to look first, not for choosing specific parcels. Site-level decisions require ground-truthing, utility checks, ownership review, and community input.
- FEMA flood zones are not used. FEMA maps regulate coastal and riverine flooding from hurricanes and storm surge — a flood hazard depaving cannot meaningfully reduce. Our pluvial (rainfall) proxy targets the flooding depaving actually addresses.
- Airport and park pavement is excluded. Runways, taxiways, and aprons at FXE and other airfields, as well as pavement within 279 city and community parks, are removed before analysis.
- The stormwater layer is a topographic proxy, not a hydraulic model. It flags areas where water would accumulate based on lidar elevation alone. It does not simulate drainage infrastructure or pipe capacity.
- Classifier imperfections. Concrete rooftops can look like pavement; heavily shaded driveways can look like vegetation. The map is directionally accurate at the tract scale; at the parcel scale it is a starting hypothesis.
For the full technical methodology — data sources, algorithms, hyperparameters, and known limitations — see the detailed methodology.