Map Gallery Preview
guest post by Matt Artz, Esri
Four Maps from the 2015 Esri User Conference Map Gallery with Transportation Themes
Each year at the annual Esri User Conference, people who use Esri’s GIS software share their best map creations at the Map Gallery. Hundreds of maps are on display at this exciting and vibrant showcase of the very best in current cartography, and awards are given for the best maps in a number of different categories. Selected maps are also considered for publication in the next edition of the Esri Map Book.
Check out the Map Gallery starting 3:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. on Monday, July 21 in the Sail Pavilion on the Upper Level of the San Diego Convention Center.
To give you a sneak preview of some of the maps you can see at the Map Gallery this year, we’re sharing four maps today with transportation themes.
Fatality Hot Spots
For their map titled “Incapacitating Injury and Fatality Accident Hot Spots,” Tarrant County Transportation Services ran analysis on accident fatalities and incapacitation accidents to identify if there were any problems with the road infrastructure.
Traffic Flow in Atlanta
This map created by Citilabs shows car traffic flow in an area of Atlanta. The map was designed in ArcGIS Desktop and then published with ArcGIS Server. According to Citilabs, their challenges in creating this map included:
“1. We needed to convey that some roads carry more cars than others. We do that by varying the width of the road.
“2. We need to show that the number of cars is different by direction on the road. We do that by drawing width from the centerline of the road either to the left or right based on the volume by direction.
“3. We had a tough challenge when handling road traffic on all roads. Freeways may carry over 100,000 cars a day while local streets only 300. If we used opaque coloring on all roads, then the freeways would effectively hide the local streets located nearby. We used transparency on the freeways — enabling us to convey a consistent width scale including freeways, while allowing the lower volume roads still to be seen underneath the transparency of the freeways.
“4. The user may vary the background map, but the dark grey map from Esri provides an excellent background for gaining a clear understanding of the level of traffic on all roadways.”
Transit Connectivity to Jobs Analysis
“This project focuses on providing a repeatable methodology to analyze transit connectivity opportunities to jobs across various counties/cities in Georgia with public transit systems or planning to build transit system,” said Binyu Wang, who created this map. “Transit accessibility increases jobs approachable area for employees who cannot afford a car and decreases air pollution by encouraging the utilization of public transportation. During the past few decades, accelerating urban expansion has imposed detrimental impacts on low-income families because less transportation methods limit their activity area. Moreover, urbanization has potentially created a discriminatory labor market with most jobs located in suburban areas. To eliminate the unbalance between where people live and where people work, a well-planned and fully-served transit system need to be offered to the public.”
“This study thus formulates a GIS model to portray demographic and employment characteristics within transit service areas, and with the availability of Origin-Destination Employment Statistics provided by US Census Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) to analyze current public transit system in study area,” Wang added. “Job opportunities are located by LEHD, and reachable job opportunities that can be accessed through public transit in study areas will be located by using General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) and local transit GIS data. The two location results will be aggregated into one map to present how well the transit system is. Finally, the implication of research result for future transit expansion development in Georgia will be discussed, deliverable maps for transit job connectivity will also available to present.”
Measuring Bus Stops Toward a Sustainable Urban Environment
This map, created by Wenbin Ma, Shirley Hsiao, and Christopher MacKechnie from Long Beach Transit, “describes how a bus stop measuring system is developed, not only to improve internal operation efficiency, but also to proactively collaborate with planners and traffic engineers on various transit/land use interface projects. This system-wide strategic planning methodology intends to strengthen the transit element in the overall urban development process.
“This measuring system is developed by assessing several transit performance-related variants at the bus stop level with a dynamic composite weighting factor approach on a GIS platform. A tier structure framework is used to categorize the composite scores of bus stops into groups. Different transit improvement strategies are applied based on the individual grouping characteristics. Two project examples are presented. One is a bus stop thinning project enacted to improve operation efficiency, and the other is for prioritizing capital project improvements.”
There’s So Much More to See
To see these and over 900 additional maps, don’t miss the Map Gallery at the 2015 Esri User Conference. And if you can’t make it to the User Conference this year, look look for the ma