Areas of safety concern are the yellow-colored walk ways. Areas of high safety concern based on the lack of accessibility to a callbox and low streetlamp coverage AND the occurrence of crimes is within the yellow circles.
- The datum matters because the coordinate system must be consistent in order for the data to be compatible and meaningful. The coordinate system must be consistent in order to compare data sets and use them for analysis.
- The coordinate system for the campus data is “+proj=lcc +lat_1=42.33333333333334 +lat_2=44 +lat_0=41.66666666666666 +lon_0=-120.5 +x_0=1500000 +y_0=0 +ellps=GRS80 +towgs84=0,0,0,0,0,0,0 +units=ft +no_defs”. The GPS coordinate system is latitude-longitude.
- For the call boxes I used a 60 feet buffer distance. This is twice the buffer distance of the lights buffer distance. I chose to make the buffer for the callboxes larger than the lights buffers because I personally think that the blue lights on the callboxes are visible from a greater distance and easy to spot in the dark. If someone needed to get to one, they would definitely be able to identify it and run to it in a reasonable amount of time from 60 feet away, even if they were injured.
- To identify areas outside of the callbox and lights buffer, I used the intersect tool with the no access to call box layer as the input and the no lights layer as the intersect, making a no lights or callbox layer as the output. This created a layer that shows portions of the sidewalks that are not covered by the light buffer or the emergency call box layer.
- Areas that seem most adequately covered by street lights and emergency call boxes are areas around buildings and along streets. Most parking lots are adequately covered, as well as areas by the dorms and the education building. More lights could be used on the quad in front of Lillis, and near the Knight library and Gerlinger Hall.
- Some issues with the crime data set include the different kinds of theft that won’t be represented in the map (for example, Theft 1, Theft 3, Theft 3, Bicycle Theft, etc). Also, there were some crimes identified as “assault” which I was unsure whether were a type of harassment. For this problem, I decided to only include crimes that actually were described using the word “harassment” or “theft”.
- A more complete report would include the nature of the crimes and perhaps an analysis on patterns in locations of crime. It would also include better information about the distances between callboxes and streetlamps with more research done to understand how far away from a callbox is too far to reach it in case of an emergency. It might also be useful to include data about how often emergency callboxes are used on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis. This information could be used to determine how useful and important the callboxes are on campus.
Simply using buffers as areas of concern does not take into account terrain which has the potential to make accessing a callbox more difficult. In this particular analysis, the buffer distance for the emergency callboxes was estimated with little knowledge about from how far away they are visible, what kind of terrain they are surrounded by, and if there is some kind of other obstacle preventing access to them.