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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2673 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Four Million Commutes Reveal New U.S. 'Megaregions'

One of the things veen and I did when we were citing the birth center is deal with isochrones. See, when you're talking about people and what kind of bullshit they'll put up with, distance matters fuckall. For example, it took me longer to get from Playa Del Rey to Pasadena (30 mi) when living in LA than it took me to get from Snohomish County to Mount Rainier (76 mi) because there's only 6 million people in the way, as opposed to 18 million.

If you get an ESRI demographic & income profile they'll break things down by "10 minute drive time radius." I'd already run the numbers on bunch of client data for two birth centers and determined that 80% of all clientele comes from 15 minute drive-time (less traffic). But isochrones are iterative and time-consuming so no wonder they didn't run this analysis on it... because really, it would have told them what we already know.

I mean... one of them is a grad student. They probably started working on it and determined that the sun would be a cinder before they ran isochrones on an entire census dataset.

So they made some pretty pictures instead.