Easily view density-based statistics
Using the map feature it's easy to switch between totals and percentages; it would be nice if seeing density based statistics were as easy. For instance if I'm looking for a location to open a commuter-focused bike shop, I do appreciate being able to see the totals and percentages of people who bike to work but areal density would probably be more helpful.
Anonymous
shared this idea
-
Thanks for the idea. To be honest, the maps are one of the more challenging parts of Census Reporter. Finding something that works for almost 30,000 variables across over 1000 tables, for over 600,000 geographies without human intervention or tuning is pretty hard!
In general, we've tried to walk a line between providing some basic features, while also making it very easy for people to get the data and do whatever they need with it. Of course, tools and skills with GIS analysis are less common than data table analysis, but there are actually a lot of free tools and guides out there.
To that end, it's easy to download the data for any detailed table as a GIS file (ESRI Shapefile, GeoJSON, or KML). From there, we'd recommend tools like QGIS, if you want a more GUI experience, or something like GeoPandas for python. For R users, the tidycensus library actually provides both data retrieval and analysis tools, including GIS, eg https://walker-data.com/census-r/mapping-census-data-with-r.html
