Activity Five - Closed for Repairs

ArcView Student Workbook

Activity Five:

Closed for Repairs

(Kingston, ON)

Activity Five - Closed for Repairs

You will use data from Kingston, Ontario in this activity. This data is available on the ArcCanada CD. Your teacher may have copied the relevant files over to a server or to the hard drive of the machine, or you may be working directly from the CD. If you can get your hands on data from your own community, you can certainly make effective use of it. This exercise has you learn a number of new GIS skills. They get to the heart of what GIS is all about.

GIS Skills

·  Thematic mapping

·  Geocoding

·  Attribute query

·  Spatial query - buffering

·  Spatial query – intersecting

·  Creating a printable map

·  Saving a project

Scenario

Princess Street, the main street in Kingston, Ontario is going to be resurfaced and rebuilt over the course of the next few weeks. Such is the nature of the road repairs the street will have to be completely closed to all traffic for at least one week. This will mean a significant loss of revenue for local business, a loss of income for employees, and an inconvenience for local residents. The municipality of Kingston has agreed to compensate businesses $1000 each for this loss of revenue. However, the council has decided that it will limit the extent of its compensation to businesses that are within 50 metres of the street. Your job is to determine the following:

·  To find out how much the city will have to pay out to business owners.

·  To calculate the number of employees who will be temporarily laid off during this period.

·  To find out how many residents in the immediate area of the street will be affected.

You have also been assigned the task of reporting on these results to council, so you must:

·  Find the results and report on them.

·  Produce a map of the affected area.

You are going to all of this in six distinct parts or steps.

Part A – Thematic Mapping

1.  At the Project window, select the View icon and then click on the New button.

2.  Once the View is up, click on the Add Theme button . This brings up the Add Theme Dialog Box:

3.  From here, find the directory path arccanada\disk2\kingston\data, open the files called enumarea.shp and lakes.shp which are the enumeration areas for Greater Kingston Area and the surrounding bodies of water. Turn them on (visible) in the View to see them.

4.  ArcView chooses random colours when you first bring themes up in a View. Some of the colours, for example the lakes, may not be very appropriate and you may want to change them. To do this double click on the theme name in the Table of Contents to open the Legend Editor:

5.  Double click on the coloured box to open the Palette box and then choose a colour you like. Hit Apply in the Legend Editor and the colour changes. Tah, dah! Close Legend Editor and the Palette Window.

6.  Now you are going to create a choropleth (or thematic) map which will show population density. Before we can do this we will have to join (See Activity 3) the population data to the Enumeration shapefile.

7.  Go to the Project Window, click on Tables, and then click on Add. Navigate to the following directory path: arccanada\disk2\kingston\tables\census\estimate\2002 and select the table named est_2002.dbf.

8.  Join this table to Enumarea.shp. See Activity Three – Thematic mapping, Part B for instructions on how to join in ArcView.

9.  Double-click on the name (Enumarea.shp) in the Table of Contents to open the Legend Editor again. In the drop down beside Legend Type, choose Graduated Color. In the drop down list beside Classification Field, choose P02totpop. Hit Apply to make a simple choropleth map.

This map is not very helpful to the task at hand, but you can see how simple it is to create a thematic map.

7.  To create a population density map, you have to divide the population by the area. In ArcView you “normalize” the population data by the area data which is in the table. From the Normalize By drop down list in the Legend Editor, choose Area_km. The box changes. Click on the Classify button and change the type to Quantile. (This means that each class contains the same number of features.) Click on OK. When you click Apply you will notice a very different pattern on your map. ArcView defaults to a Red monochromatic colour ramp. This is a tad too intense and so you should change it to Blue-green monochromatic. Hit Apply again and close the Legend Editor.

Part B - Geocoding

8.  You need to add the streets of Kingston to this. Use the Add Theme button . From the directory path arccanada\disk2\kingston, open the file streets.shp. Turn it on.

9.  Now you have to tell ArcView what units you want to work in. Choose Properties under View on the menu. Set Map Units to decimal degrees and Distance Units to meters. Hit OK and you are back to the View.

10.  You can’t see much because the street file only covers the City of Kingston “proper” and not the whole of the Greater Kingston area. You need to zoom in. Choose the Zoom In tool , and drag a rectangle around the central core of Kingston. (Note that you may which to change the zoom as you progress.)

11.  Return to the Project Window (Window menu, choose Untitled). Click on Tables choose Add. Open business.dbf in the directory path arcanada\disk2\kingston\tables\business. This is a file of some different types of stores in downtown Kingston. When you click OK, the DBF file is opened in a Table Document, not a View. Note that it is a .dbf file and is not mappable as it stands.

ArcView reports to you how many records are in the table, and how many of them are selected. You’ll see the Record Counter in the upper left area of the ArcView application:

You want to have no records selected at this time (0 of 347). Click Clear Selected Features button before proceeding just to make sure.

To map these businesses, you have to geocode them to the shapefile of Kingston streets.

Note: You may find that you are able to Geocode without doing the following step. Look under View on the main menu and if Geocode Address is available, skip down to Step 13.

12. Make the View window active (Window menu, View1). Our first step is to tell ArcView how to use the attribute in the Roads.shp file to match postal addresses in the real world. To do this, make Streets.shp the active theme and bring up the Theme Properties window by choosing Properties from the Theme menu.

Click on the Geocoding icon on the left side of the window. Set the Address Style to US Streets, and in the centre scroll area, make the following settings (Note, after each setting, ArcView automatically scrolls to the next field):

Property Name / Setting
LeftFrom / Addr_fm_le
LeftTo / Addr_to_le
RightFrom / Addr_fm_rg
RightTo / Addr_to_rg
StreetName / Name

All the other properties can be left alone. Click on OK to close the Theme Properties window. Click on Yes at the following prompt:

13. You are ready to Geocode. From the main menu choose View, and then Geocode Addresses. You get the Geocode Addresses box. Make sure the Address Table is business.dbf and set the Offset Distance to 15m. You may wish to set the directory path to something other than c:\temp. Leave everything else alone and hit Batch Match.

In the Re-Match Addresses box, the results should show close to100% Good Match. (99% is just fine).

Hit Done and the new theme of the business .dbf file appears in the View window in the table of contents, probably called Geocd1.shp. (Don’t worry if it says something else.) Turn the new theme on.

15. Make the new theme active and go to Theme on the menu and then Properties. Change the name of the theme to something more sensible than geocd1.shp. For our purposes today, we are going to call it Businesses. After you change the name, click on the Definition Icon, and then click OK.

16. Just for practice, change the name of the View to something more meaningful than View1. Under View choose Properties and then type in a name. You decide. (Kingston?)

Part C – Attribute Query

Now it is time to find out which stores are within 50m of the Princess Street.

17. First, in the View window Table of Contents make Roads.shp active. From the Theme menu, choose Query. This brings up the Query dialogue box for the Roads.shp. Use this Query Builder to construct the following query: [Name] = “PRINCESS”

Click on New Set and close the Query Builder. Use the Zoom to Selected button to see all of Princess Street, which is highlighted with a yellow line.

Part D – Buffering (Spatial Query)

18.  Now make Businesses the active theme on the table of contents. Then under Theme choose Select By Theme and you get the Select By Theme box. In the bar under the select features of choose Roads.shp. In the bar under Select features of active themes that choose Are Within A Distance Of Under Selection Distances type in 50.

Hit New Set. Yellow dots appear on the screen. Actually, some of the business locations turn yellow. These are ones within 50m of Princess Street.

What you have done is called buffering and is a really important part of GIS.

19.  Open the attribute table for Business . Use the Promote button to move all the selected records to the top of the table. They are, of course, the yellow coloured records. To see how many records there are in the table within 50m of Princess Street, look in the Record Counter. You can now calculate the amount of money the government will have to pay out. Write down your calculations here:

Selected Businesses / Amount of Compensation / Total Amount
X / $1,000.00 / =

20.  To find out the number of employees affected by this engineering marvel, in the attribute table, click on the field header called Employees. Notice that the header appears pushed in. From the Field menu, choose Statistics and a report box opens. The Sum is the total number of employees who can’t go to work. Notice what else is provided in this window. Click OK when you are sick of staring at it. Write down the number here:

Number of affected employees:

Part E – Select by Intersection (Spatial Query)

For this next step, we need to return to the map View (you may want to close the Table Documents – the screen could be getting cluttered by now). Make the View Window active. Double check that Princess Street is still selected (highlighted) in the Roads.shp theme.

21.  Make Enumarea.shp the active theme in the table of contents. From the Theme menu, choose Select By Theme. This brings up the Select By Theme window again. This time, you want to “select features of active themes that Intersect the selected features of Roads.shp”

Hit New Set. Some of the Enumeration Areas are now shown in Yellow. These are ones within that intersect Princess Street – That is, Princess Street borders or runs through these Enumeration areas

22.  Open the attribute table for Enumarea.shp . Use the Promote button to move all the selected records to the top of the table. They are, of course, the yellow coloured records. Same as before, to find out the number of residents affected, click on the field header called Pop_91. From the Field menu, choose Statistics and the same report box opens. The Sum is the total number of residents living in those areas bordering on the construction site. Write the answer here:

Number of affected residents:

Part F – Create Printable Map

23.  Now, we want to create our cartographic output to accompany your report. Return to the View window (a refresher, go to the Window menu, and choose “Kingston” or whatever you set the name of your View to in Step 16..

1. Make Businesses.shp active, the effected businesses should still be in yellow, convert these to a new shapefile so that you can identify them on your final map. Some of the other features are also currently selected (yellow). This will spoil our cartographic output. So, make all four themes in the Table of Contents active - hold down the Shift key, while you select each theme.

Choose the Clear Selected Features button to unselect all the features. You should see no yellow features on your View, and it should now look something like this (except you will have a new shapefile for you businesses effected by the construction):

25.  Choose the Zoom In tool , and drag a rectangle around the central core of Kingston. Chose a relatively small area in the central core of Kingston.

1. Using the Label Tool Label Princess Street as shown. Note, you need to make just Roads.shp the active theme first:

27.  You now want to create a map Layout from your View. From the View menu, choose Layout. This will bring up the Template Manger:

Select Landscape, and click OK.

This creates a brand new Layout document. Examine what you see.

A layout is comprised of a page (the shadowed box) and some elements – The map itself, map title, scale bar, north arrow and legend. You can rearrange, remove or manipulate any of these elements. For now, we will accept the map as it is.

If you were working at a computer that was hook up to a printer, you could print your layout, and it would appear exactly as you see it here. Also, you can export you layout in as a windows bitmap (BMP), or other file types and import these into other applications, such as Microsoft PowerPoint.