> rational boundaries like states, counties, localities, suburbs, or any other reasonably controlled, surveyed, and relatively consistent dataset.
Those boundaries aren't necessarily rational either.
But not only does your post code not reference your political boundaries. Your postal city may not be a political city, or may not match your political city. I've lived in several places where I needed to write the city that the post office serving my house was in, if I wanted to receive mail. It's really more of the name of the post office, there are plenty of post offices in unincorporated county land, which doesn't belong to any city.
> The algorithm uses US Census data, so perhaps using county boundaries would be ideal?
Counties are too big to be atomic units in any algorithm that assigns districts that would be meet the requirements for reasonably equal size districts.
> I'm not american, but I imagine both census and zipline boundaries as honouring geographic and community boundaries.
ZIP codes don't do either particularly well, and census blocks might approximately do one or the other (not always the same for different boundaries) but they can't consistently do both, since the two can conflict.
Does the data reflect true geographic boundaries or just USPS boundary definitions?
USPS addresses are based on delivery convenience and may not accurately reflect underlying political boundaries.
For example, in the San Jose area, there are many Los Gatos addresses that are actually in Saratoga (or unincorporated land) and vice-versa. There are even properties with Los Gatos mailing addresses that are actually outside of Santa Clara County altogether (in Santa Cruz).
Where I am from cities cannot legally cross county boundaries. But the people who live just across the county line still have a postal address with the name of the city because doing anything else would not make sense on a practical level. In fact I'm not sure if they are technically in a city at all.
Ah ok. So we are looking at pretty large inaccuracies then. Typically you only want to draw in the county boundaries if you have reliable county level data. I’d call that a flaw.
In my region (an inner suburb of the Northeast Megalopolis) an attempt like this to use vague "place" boundaries would lead to a blur of overlapping boundaries that stretches for ~500 miles.
> A review of the Top 10 most populous U.S. cities indicates only half of them have obtained .gov domains, including Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio, and San Diego.
Believing mailing address cities actually corresponds to a unit of government is one thing I learned is incorrect when I moved to the LA area.
I live near a place called Westlake Village that straddles the LA County/Ventura County line. In LA County, Westlake Village is a city. In Ventura County, Westlake Village is a neighborhood within Thousand Oaks, and it has a different tax rate. But both mailing addresses use Westlake Village as the city.
Similarly, I have friends that live in Newbury Park, and that's what is on his mailing address. But Newbury Park is just a neighborhood within Thousand Oaks.
This is a good time to remind folks that arbitrary political borders are, well, arbitrary and that all serious city-to-city comparisons should be done using MSA numbers.
A failure to understand this leads to all kinds of ridiculous impressions and conclusions.
I don't think a city in the US is a good sample, since people are more likely to move in and out of the city during a generational (or multi-generational) test case. In addition, city lines/boundaries are "fuzzy" a lot of the time, often with one side of a street being incorporated and the other side not, etc. City boundary lines may also shift over time, etc.
In addition, if it's known anyone with an Oakland address gets BI, some (or many) people will attempt to move there, which will cause other unintended economic consequences for the city, skewing the test results.
A [small] nation is a better sample, since it tends to have fewer of these issues over a long time span.
> This map is measuring the land value within a county. Land values are dependent on population density.
Not strictly, though population density is certainly a factor (and, since its total land value in each county, so is population, which -- as counties are not of uniform size -- is a separate concern from population density. And, probably more directly than either of those, Gross County Product.)
It's that the case anywhere? Even city centre / suburbs will have different values, much less a whole province where A may contain an empty field or a group of residential buildings with 50 floors and shared lifts.
I could see how it would be useful for a map of a city, or maybe even at a scale of some regions... but not for comparing totals between regions.
I don't strongly disagree with your point here, but like all city statistics that aren't normalized for area and density (e.g. by using the MSA/CSA or some equivalent), this one is potentially quite misleading. Kansas City draws its borders around an awful lot of rural land that wouldn't be (indeed, isn't) counted inside the borders of most cities. This is all well within the city limits, for example:
> Portland, OR, was selected as the comparison site for Seattle, WA, based on Mahalanobis distance matching to evaluate the four largest municipalities in each of Washington and Oregon as potential comparison sites [etc]
They had more of a reason and included the model they used to pick the city.
It's also quite beneficial to keep the areas somewhat near in that there will be less variance in the number of item codes between close locations (i.e. different drinks are sold on the east coast vs west coast since some brands are local)
From a different section:
> Custom-ordered data were provided from store outlets geocoded within the
boundaries of the taxing jurisdiction of Seattle, WA, the comparison site, Portland, OR
I suspect they didn't have enough funding to afford more geocoded scanner data given that it sounds like they had to pay for custom data at a rate per-geocoded location... or didn't have the funding to process that much more data.
It wasn't clear how much of the dataset labeling was manual, but it sounded like the study's authors may have had to sift through several thousand barcodes by hand.
> They tell me I need a state or province. H? Chí Minh City is a city without a province. (There are five such cities that have the same rank as a province and thus aren't contained within one.)
Common in London, too -- even on British websites. They'll require a city and a county, at which point I need to enter "London" for both. Things will still be delivered correctly, fortunately.
... as "2000 Oxnard #1-001a" but there is no corresponding precinct in their GIS, where the lexically-nearest precinct is "OXNARD NO. 1-002". On the other hand, there is a corresponding polling place "0004100 Oxnard #101AL", which still has the old designation 4100 for that precinct, as seen in past election results.
The suffix "2000" Seems to have some special significance to this county, as there is 1 such precinct per city, and none of them are in the GIS precinct shapefile:
02000 Avenue #1-001
12000 El Rio #1-001
20000 Hollywood #5-001
2000 Oxnard #1-001a
42000 Mupu #3-001
62000 Rice #3-001
72000 Sta Paula #3-001a
82000 Slvr Strd #5-001a
92000 Thou Oaks #2-001a
What could it mean? Probably early voting in person, provisional voting, or some other "virtual" precinct.'
If you think this is weird I advise you to not look at the US Census.
Those boundaries aren't necessarily rational either.
But not only does your post code not reference your political boundaries. Your postal city may not be a political city, or may not match your political city. I've lived in several places where I needed to write the city that the post office serving my house was in, if I wanted to receive mail. It's really more of the name of the post office, there are plenty of post offices in unincorporated county land, which doesn't belong to any city.
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