Looking for a good GIS Intro Project

[burnham follower]

Hello GISers,
I am an in a University Level Intro to GIS class and we are begining to look at what we are doing for our final projects. I am mostly interested in Urban/Regional planning and of the New Urbanist/Smart Growth/Suburbia must die point of veiw. We use ArcGIS 9 and must demonstrate our ability to infer things from our maps and what not. Initially, I was planning on demonstrating how low population density does not mean low traffic density, but my prof said traffic density stuff is often expensive and hard to come by. So I was wondering if anyone either had that type of data they wanted to 'lend' me, or if any of you brilliant planning type people had any ideas. The school is in rural MN, I'm from Chicago, and like working with things I'm familiar with.

[supergeek1313]

new york data is very easy to come by & i can send you plenty of data sets from my old GIS projects (one is on low income housing tax credits which is pretty interesting, as well as old buildings in lower manhattan). if you're interested in toronto stuff let me know too as i have a lot of data for that as well.

[burnham follower]

Do you have NYC traffic data? or what other kinds of data do you have for NYC I guess is a better question? I would love to compare multiple cities.

[rheimann]

ArcGIS user,

ESRI has both ArcWeb services and Business analyst (a subset of ArcWeb) that serve traffic data. If your familiar with those funky little strips that you drive over from time to time, then you know ESRI's source. Moreover this data is nationwide and possibly free or drastically discounted for students. @ esri.com > search for ArcWeb or Business Analyst Online.

Good Luck
Richard

[kbunker]

That's the place to get aadt (average annual daily traffic) data around here. State DOT may too. State GIS perhaps. Somebody has a points layer of observation stations that can be joined with a spreadsheet, I bet. You just have to find it. The data request mantra is "purely academic purposes."

Good luck