PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

Calculating the driving distance with demographics

In the Using polygon overlays for proportional census estimates recipe in Chapter 2, Structures That Work, we employed a simple buffer around a trail alignment in conjunction with the census data to get estimates of what the demographics were of the people within walking distance of the trail, estimated as a mile long. The problem with this approach, of course, is that it assumes that it is an "as the crow flies" estimate. In reality, rivers, large roads, and roadless stretches serve as real barriers to people's movement through space. Using pgRouting's pgr_drivingDistance function, we can realistically simulate people's movement on the routable networks and get better estimates. For our ...