Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Well a) there are actual exclaves in Austin, so it is by definition impossible to navigate everywhere in Austin without leaving the city even if you were just doing walking as the crow flies, b) city limits are always by their very definition due to political boundaries because a city is a political entity which chooses by political process what areas to absorb and what areas to not absorb,
|
Sorry, I didn't catch that you meant "impossible to reach by road from anywhere else" without leaving city limits.
Granted. Austin (at least currently) has some exclaves.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
c) you also have many other measures of compactness which are used in my own research. For an overview of different measures, please see:
http://cdn.azavea.com/com.redistrict...Paper_2010.pdf
http://cdn.azavea.com/com.redistrict...Paper_2010.pdf
In my own academic research (which focuses on geographic distribution of voters across space and how that interplays into a divisive primary's impact on general election vote shares, as well as other spatial analysis involving district level elections), I use these compactness measures all the time (particularly Reock, as it is the most widely used measure with the least external validity problems according to the best minds in the discipline). It isn't as if I'm just telling you "oh, Austin is less compact" because I believe that it is so. I'm saying that because I've been running these numbers for years and so I've got a practiced eye. I could be wrong here, of course, having not bothered to download shape files and see, but I really don't think I am. |
Thank you for the links, very interesting.
Maybe the disconnect here is that while "indentedness" (figure 3, your first link) may be a useful tool for catching unneeded/illegal gerrymandering, I'm claiming it's much less of a concern for the general functioning of a city.
For purposes of providing transportation, transit, police and fire coverage, access to parks, etc. I believe there's very little benefit to that first shape in that figure vs. the last.
It's that middle one that is problematic.
So I agree with this Reock measurement, at least as far as I'm understanding it. I think it's measuring the same things I was eyeballing.
But under that measurement, Austin still seems more compact to me.
LA is going to require a bounding circle with a diameter of at least 45 miles and some change (we'll call it 45), which gives it an area of ~1590 square miles. Compared to it's actual area of 503 square miles, or ratio ~3.2
That same ratio applied to Austin (271 square miles) would give us a bounding circle with a radius of 16.5 miles.
But a radius of 15 miles seems enough to completely enclose Austin (with a centroid approximately at Lamar and 29th).
Prev
Did anyone else know about this or am I the only one who missed the transformation? I should have noticed the newbie (ATX) had over 3K posts. Well I missed you, glad you are back, er...never left, but I thought you mentioned a while back you were leaving Austin...
Linear Mode
