Calgary data projectRows are not swings: counting Calgary's playground equipment properly
The City of Calgary publishes a list of playground equipment that Calgary Parks maintains or that sits on land in its care, updated weekly. Our students use it to learn the difference between counting rows and counting things. All figures below are ours, worked out from the copy we downloaded on 22 October 2026.
Rows by equipment type, as we counted them in the City of Calgary Playground Equipment file (5,905 rows; top eight types; downloaded 22 October 2026). One row is one piece of equipment as the city records it| TYPE_DESCRIPTION in the file | Rows |
|---|
| SWING | 1,225 |
| MULTI PLAY COMPLEX | 1,116 |
| SPRING TOY | 684 |
| CLIMBER | 592 |
| STATIONARY TOY | 543 |
| SPINNING TOY | 494 |
| TEETER TOTTER SEESAW | 382 |
| FITNESS EQUIPMENT | 291 |
A child asked how many swings Calgary has will read 1,225 off that table. That is the number of swing rows, and a swing frame can hold several seats. The file has columns for that, COUNT_SR_SWING for standard seats and COUNT_BABY_SWING for baby seats, and adding them up gives a different and more interesting answer. This short program counts the types, sums the seats and runs one more check. Nothing beyond the standard library is needed, and it looks for the CSV in its own folder:import csv
from collections import Counter
by_label = Counter()
seats = Counter()
blank_baby = 0
labels_for_code = {}
with open("playground-equipment.csv", encoding="utf-8-sig") as equipment:
for row in csv.DictReader(equipment):
label = row["TYPE_DESCRIPTION"]
by_label[label] += 1
labels_for_code.setdefault(row["ASSET_TYPE"], set()).add(label)
if label == "SWING":
for column in ("COUNT_SR_SWING", "COUNT_BABY_SWING"):
if row[column].strip():
seats[column] += int(row[column])
if not row["COUNT_BABY_SWING"].strip():
blank_baby += 1
for label, n in by_label.most_common(8):
print(label, n)
print(dict(seats), "| SWING rows with no baby-seat count:", blank_baby)
for code in sorted(labels_for_code, key=int):
if len(labels_for_code[code]) != 1:
print("code", code, "has labels", sorted(labels_for_code[code]))
1. Count rows
A Counter tallies TYPE_DESCRIPTION once per row. It answers how many pieces of each type the city lists, which is a fair question with a clear answer: 1,225 swings, 1,116 multi play complexes, 684 spring toys.
2. Sum quantities
On the swing rows, the seat columns add up to 1,356 standard seats and 1,162 baby seats. But 176 swing rows leave the baby-seat count blank, so 1,162 is a floor, not a total: the true number can only be higher.
3. Check codes against labels
Each type also has a numeric code in ASSET_TYPE. Code 1 should always mean SWING, yet one code-1 row says CLIMBER; code 5 carries SPINNING TOY, KIDS_TABLE and one SPRING TOY. Those few rows are worth a polite email to the city, not a guess.
More of our checks on the same City of Calgary file (our counts; the city publishes none of these totals)| Question | What we found |
|---|
| Rows marked ACTIVE and INSTALLED in LIFE_CYCLE_STATUS | 5,684 and 221 |
| INSTALLED rows maintained by DEVELOPER CONSTRUCTION | All 221 of them |
| Rows that are not swings but still hold a swing-seat count | 144 |
| EQUIPMENT_AGE_CLASS: SENIOR, JUNIOR, COMBINED, blank | 1,811, 1,370, 992 and 1,732 |
Where the file stops
The file lists equipment, not playgrounds, and it does not tell us how many separate playgrounds there are, how old each piece is or what state it is in. SENIOR and JUNIOR are the city's own age classes for equipment; we do not guess the ages behind them. Saying exactly what a count means is the part of the lesson that lasts.
The licence is the Open Government Licence - City of Calgary, version 2.1, which permits commercial use as long as the source is credited. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - City of Calgary (licence, dataset page). The counts are ours; the City of Calgary has no part in this page or in our teaching.
