Masthead

Mid-semester Review: Urban Planning to Promote Healthy Lifestyles

image of people walking

Introduction

Much of the content in this lab is a review of the lessons covered in previous labs. As a results, the instructions given in this lab will be less detailed. If you are unsure how to complete any of the steps, refer to your previous labs for more detailed instructions. In particular, Parts I, II, and III of the Music Festival labs.

Scenario

The City of Pasadena is interested in developing urban planning projects to fight the rising incidence of obesity and promote healthy lifestyles. One of the proposed projects is the placement of “Park and Walk” lots throughout the city. These lots will offer free parking for the first 90 minutes as an incentive for commuters to walk to multiple businesses and points of interest in the city rather than drive from place to place.

The project is in the early planning stages. It is your job to locate a suitable site for potential “Park and Walk” lots. The parcel criteria include the following:

The County of Los Angeles uses the State Plane spatial reference system. You'll be working in NAD 83, California State Plane Zone V, Feet for this entire lab.

Learning Outcomes

Skill Drill: Setting up Your Workspace

By now you should be familiar with file management protocols for GIS. In a workplace setting, having consistent file management protocols is necessary to prevent errors and lost data.

Set up your basic folder structure for this project within a parent folder (originals, working, final).

Skill Drill: Acquire the Data

The city of Los Angeles has an extensive collection of GIS datasets. These datasets are accessible through the Los Angeles GIS Data Portal. In this step, you will find the data portal and download what we need to complete this analysis.

The datasets we have to find include:

image of Los Angeles GIS Data Portal website

Use Google to find the Los Angeles data portal. Once there, click on the Welcome link and take a moment to read about the website and the GIS Data Disclaimer before proceeding. If you have ear buds, you may watch the instructional videos for using the site.

  1. Locate and download the "LA County Boundary". Read the metadata located on the GIS download page.

Question 1: What kind of information can you find on the download page? Is the same information available when you view the metadata in ArcMap?

  1. Complete a QAQC Form for the LA Country Boundary dataset.

Skill Drill 1

  1. Repeat Steps 4 and 5 for the following data sets:
    • City Boundaries

You may have to look around a bit to find these data sets. Check the list of categories on the left side of the web site and note that some of the names of the files may change over time.

Question 2: Are all of the data projected to optimize accuracy for this region? Do you need to re-project any of the data?

  1. To save time, the following shapefiles have been provided for you on the "X" drive. You do not need to QAQC them.

Skill Drill: Locating Potential "Park and Walk" Sites.

Several of our data sets are very large. To facilitate a quicker processing time for our overlay operations, we should clip each dataset to our area of interest, the City of Pasadena and the City of South Pasadena.

  1. Create a shapefile from the City Boundaries layer that contains only the cities of Pasadena and South Pasadena. Call the new shapefile pasadenaCities.shp.

image of pasadena cities layer

Skill Drill 2

  1. Clip each of our data sets to the extent covered by pasadenaCities.shp. You may skip the LA County Boundary layer.
  2. Remove the original shapefiles from your table of contents as you go.

Skill Drill 3: Identify the best parcel

First we must identify parcels where the zone code will permit automobile parking.

  1. Create a selection layer from the parcel zones where the parcel has a "Zone_Code" of "C4", "CD-5 AD-2", or "RS" (Note that "CD-5 AD-2" is one code).
  2. To narrow down our location, the city would like to only include parcels near certain main thoroughfares within the city. These streets include "Colorado Blvd" and "Fair Oaks Ave". Create a new layer and be sure to include the "North, South, East, and West" designations of these streets (for example you would want both "Colorado Blvd" and also "E Colorado Blvd" and "W Colorado Blvd"). Like many tasks in GIS, there are mulitple ways to do this. Select the option below that you are the most comfortable with
    1. Use a serices of "OR" expressions for each of the names that include "Colorado Blvd" or "Fair Oaks Ave" as you did for the zones. The following "WHERE" clause in "Select by Attributes" will select any strings that contain the words "E Colorado Blvd". Your task is to extend this to include all the different version of the names for "Colorado Blvd" and "Fair Oaks Ave":
      1. "FullName" = 'E Colorado Blvd' OR ...
    2. Use the "LIKE" operator and then the wildcard character which will match any string. The following "WHERE" clause in "Select by Attributes" will select any strings that contain the words "Colorado Blvd". Your task is to extend this to include "Fair Oaks Ave":
      1. "FullName" LIKE '%Colorado Blvd%' OR ...
  3. Select the parcels that are within 100 meters of the two streets mentioned above. You can do this by buffering the streets layer and then performing "Select by Location". There is also a shorter route where you can specify a "search distance" in the "Select by Location" tool.

 

The buffer above is in "meters", make sure you buffer in the correct units!

  1. Export this selection as a new shapefile called "zones_near_thoroughfares.shp".

image of parcel selection near main thoroughfares

Next we would like to further narrow down the potential parcels by area. The due to the cost and complications of purchasing multiple adjacent parcels, the city would like to eliminate small parcels from consideration.

  1. Create a selection layer from zones_near_thoroughfares.shp where the parcels are greater than 3,000 square meters.

The City would also like to eliminate parcels that are too far away from existing bike paths.

  1. Further refine your selection layer where the parcels are within 300 meters of an existing bike path.

For our final search criteria, the City would like to choose a parcel based on proximity to the greatest number of businesses and points of interest.

image of buffered parcels

 

  1. Create a 200 meter buffer around each parcel.
  2. Intersect the points of interest layer with each buffer.
  3. Select the parcel that contains the greatest number of points of interest locations that intersect its corresponding 200 meter buffer. This will be your final result.

Skill Drill: Create a Flowchart of your Methods

Ideally, you should be able to create a flowchart that illustrates the steps you are about to take to plan your analysis. Flowcharts are useful for planning the steps of your analysis, but also for helping others to understand your methods as well. However, it takes practice to be able to create a flowchart as a planning tool before your analysis is complete, so instead we will work through the creation of a flowchart retroactively as a means of communicating what we have already done.

Typical Symbols Used to Create the Flow Charts in 270 (Sample PowerPoint File).

To build our flowchart, we will be using Microsoft PowerPoint.

  1. From windows start menu, search for and open Microsoft PowerPoint.
  2. From the Home tab choose Layout from the Slides panel and select Blank to clear the slide.
  3. From the Home tab, locate the drawing panel and find the flowchart drawing tools
  4. Select the flowchart:preparation tool and draw it at the top of the page.

Your flowchart should contain broad "Upper Level" steps. That means you don't want to over-complicate your flow chart with a high level of detail. There should be just enough detail to communicate your methods to the reader and potentially to allow another GIS technician to follow your steps.

Recall that our first step was to create a project folder structure. This will also be the first step in our flowchart.

  1. In the rectangle, type in the words "Set up project folder structure". Use about a 10 point font size for legibility.

image of power point flow chart tools

Recall that our next step was to acquire data from the Los Angeles County GIS Data Portal. Then after that, we completed a QAQC form for each dataset.

  1. Draw another flowchart:preparation hexagon for each of these two steps: downloading the data, and the QAQC form
  2. Type in the appropriate labels in each rectangle. Make sure the words are small enough to fit inside.
  3. From the lines tools use the elbow connector arrow to connect the polygons in your flowchart. This will allow the arrows to follow the polygons if you move them around.

image of first three flowchart steps

By now you should have seen similar examples of flowcharts from previous labs. Now it's up to you to complete this flowchart. Use different polygon shapes for decisions, processes, and data. Refer to the Flowchart Supplementary learning module for more detailed instructions on how to create a flow chart.

Question 3: Do you remember the next step in your methods? What did you do next?

Skill Drill 4

  1. Repeat steps 22,23,& 24 for each major step in your analysis.
  2. Periodically save your PowerPoint file as you go.
  3. When you are done building your flowchart, save it as a png and include it in your final report

In Lab Turn-In

QAQC Form of the "City Boundary" and "County Boundary" shapefiles.

Take Home Turn-In

A completed report that includes:

Creating Reports in MS-Word

Contact Info

HSU Geospatial Sites

Geospatial Information

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