More random musings

I know you've all been wondering when I was going to get around to figuring out what to post for my journal for last Thursday's class.

I've been thinking for my project, maybe instead of doing it on unemployment in Scotland County, NC, I'll do an analytical comparison between the locations of jobs in the Asheville area, the public transportation available, and the places where people actually live. It is my hypothesis that Asheville City Transit is designed with the idea that people live in neighborhoods around the city and work downtown. But I hypothesize that in reality most jobs are not downtown and Asheville's model of transportation is actually incredibly impractical for the vast majority of people in Asheville, not to mention the other parts of Buncombe County that it serves.

It will be easy to get population data by census tract, and I can probably georeference the transit map, but the more subjective part of my project will be the locations of jobs. I doubt they have a gis layer already around for that!

I can find the list of the county's top ten or so employers from the employment security commission web site. and then I guess what i'll do is look in the classifieds. Maybe we can assume that if I take a large enough sample of job openings which list physical addresses, then I will have an accurate enough sampling of the locations of jobs.

And if these jobs are new or emerging, even better, then we're developing a transportation map that is prepared for the future.

Of course I'm no expert and I don't know a damn thing about transportation planning, but, it'll be fun. I'll find a few scholarly articles on the subject to add to my footnotes.