a-b-street/abstreet

Feature request: equity evaluation using census data

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#116 opened on Jul 2, 2020

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 (1 comment) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)Rust (6,779 stars) (256 forks)batch import
design-neededgood first issue

Description

Overlay data source like U.S. Census American Community Survey to get demographic distributions by geographic region. Draw demographic characteristics for travelers as part of trip generation based on a given traveler's location. This could be used to show how travel time varies by income (or race) in a given street configuration. So, you could see whether a given modification made for a more (or less) equal distribution of travel times across demographic factors.

Side note: demographic data could also be paired with other data sources like PSRC's Household Travel Survey Data (Seattle-area only and not generalizable to other cities) to inform mode choice. Not sure if something like this is already incorporated into the mode choice model.

Contributor guide

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backendanalytics
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
5
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
over 1 week
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
needs investigation
Prerequisites
Rust programmingSpatial data conceptsABStreet codebase knowledge
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
20
Research direction
Start by understanding the existing trip generation model in ABStreet, likely in the 'sim' or 'map model' modules. Research how to integrate demographic data from the US Census American Community Survey, possibly using geographic coordinates to map traveler locations to census tracts. Then design a way to overlay travel time results with demographic attributes to visualize equity outcomes.