An open letter to Asheville City Transit

(now that I have your attention. ... I posted this in my comments, but people often forget to read the comments of comments)

Thank you for your feedback, paul -v-.

I created the Asheville Transit layer as part of a final project for an intro to GIS class I took last semester at AB Tech. I was naive and thought it wouldn't be difficult to create! I georeferenced an Asheville City transit map to a Buncombe Streets layer, and then I selected the portions of the streets that overlapped and exported them into the various routes. When I was done with all the routes, I consolidated them all into one layer. I am rather proud of it. There are a few mistakes, the digital equivalent of typos. and I believe I only put the daytime routes on it.

It was very educational and I know much more about Asheville Transit Routes than I did before.

The assignment was to perform some kind of analysis. I compared the transit map to population density information gleaned from 1990 TIGER/Census data and found that while the transit routes match up pretty well with areas of high population density, the Enka-Candler area has a much higher population density than other places that Asheville Transit serves, like Weaverville and Black Mountain. And Asheville Transit only goes to the DMV and then stops. I also applied a buffer -- I think I put it at two miles -- around transit routes, assuming that most folks desperate enough could be reasonably expected to walk two miles to the nearest bus stop. Therefore, I only looked at areas of high pop density which were outside of the 2-mile buffer.

I concluded that while my census data was almost 20 years out of date, it seemed reasonable that the population of the Enka-Candler area has only increased in the last 20 years, and thus is all the more in need of transportation further out Smokey Park Highway than the DMV.

I also looked at the density of elderly folk and renters, those being the closest I could approach to the demographics that might be expected to ride Asheville Transit. And these, too, came out to be high in the Enka-Candler area and indeed higher there than in other places that Asheville Transit does serve.

It was the overambitious naivete of a beginner that caused me to embark on such a project in ArcMap, but it was also that I worked a boring job as a data-entry clerk and it was a great opportunity to come home and apply my brain to something interesting and analytical.

I suppose I should have told someone at Asheville Transit sooner about my results. But then, I was just a data-entry clerk at the time, and my analytical thoughts seemed pretty irrelevent in the grand scheme of things.

Unfortunately I cannot find a copy of the maps or analysis that I turned in as my final project. This is what the Asheville Transit project looked like in its initial stages, before I finished the transit layer and added the buffers:

http://blogforgisclass.blogspot.com/2008/04/oops.html