I thought it could be interesting to see how many people live within walking distance of frequent transit in Columbus, so I downloaded some Census data and linked it to GIS maps of Census Block Groups.
Using a simple half-mile buffer of the three frequent transit routes (#1, #2, #10), I found that the census block groups within this area contained about 234,000 people in 2000. That is 22% of the population of Franklin County (1,068,978 according to 2000 data). That seems like a pretty sizable amount to me, but if we were setting goals,what percent would we want it to be? More? Maybe one third (33%) or one half (50%) of the population?
I’ll do a second post later to quantify how many more people would be within walking distance of frequent transit with various service improvement options.
Do you know when the 2010 census data for those census block groups will be available? I know some of it has rolled out already, but not all of it. Will be interesting to see if those percentages have gone up or down in the past 10 years.
Either way, great data visualization though, and great find.
Sometime this month.
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/saff/main.html?_lang=en