Hello,
Background: I have a list of roughly 80 locations for which trade areas were created at the Census Tract level. Each location trade area is a collection of Census Tracts.
Challenge: The trade areas were created externally and don't have any knowledge of how they were created. No methodology documentation left behind unfortunately. This is posing a challenge because I'm being tasked with better understanding these trade area extents so I can apply to new locations (for which trade area extents haven't been applied).
Question: Wondering if there is a way to get a general understanding of the size of each location's trade area? For example, lets say the trade area of location A consists of 10 Census Tracts. Is there a way to aggregate these 10 Census Tracts into a spatial object and subsequently retrieve spatial information (e.g. radius size, drive-distance, drive-time, square miles, etc.) on that object?
Explanation: Here's the reasoning behind my question above. I've been told the trade area extents are based (in large part) on the urbanity (density) of each location. This is important information because I happen to know the urbanity of each location. As a result, I'm hoping to retrieve spatial information on each of the trade areas and see how it differs based on urbanity. For example, urban core locations might have a radius of 2-miles, on average, versus 10 miles for rural locations. I also know the urbanity of each of the new locations so I'll be able to leverage this information to assign trade area extents to them.
I've attached a .pdf that'll hopefully allow you to visualize what I've laid out above. As you'll see, it's a map of a couple locations along with their corresponding Census Tract trade areas. I've also attached the Alteryx workbook I used to create the .pdf. Hopefully this is helpful but let me know if I can provide anything else.
Thanks!
Dave
