Poster

This poster examines whether larger shopping centers in the Twin Cities metropolitan area are surrounded by more highways. Using ESRI’s ArcMap, quarter-mile ring buffers (out to 1.5 miles) were generated around 19 shopping centers, and the highways falling within each ring were counted and distance-weighted. Averaging the results by center size suggests that larger shopping centers do tend to have more highways around them — the mega and regional centers scored noticeably higher than sub-regional centers.

Map layers (major shopping centers, major highways, and county/city boundaries) were produced by the Metropolitan Council and obtained from datafinder.org. The analysis was done in ArcGIS 9.3, and the shopping center photographs were taken by the author in April 2009.