Overcoming Challenges and Why It's Worth It

I'm going to be completely honest and flat-out say that from a GIS standpoint, this weekend was a challenge! I've been working on my final project of my graduate career, which is a GIS-based analysis of the Westchester County Bee-Line bus system. I'm trying to determine which routes should run 24 hours a day based on their connectivity to retail clusters in Southern and Central Westchester County. Putting together this project has been much harder than I originally anticipated. It grew to be much more than a simple point a to point b analysis, but rather a complicated combination of kernel density estimates, rasters, polygons, and network analyses. It kept feeling like nothing was working! I grew exponentially more frustrated each day. However, Sunday night, I somehow broke through and got one of the network analyst tools to pull through and give me results that were in line with my hypothesis! It's far from perfect and still has a few errors, but as of now, it works.

An epic project still in its infancy :) Of course, I still was a little frustrated and bothered until I told a few friends about my breakthrough. They instantly responded with how desperately they wanted 24 hour service for their respective Bee-Line routes. Tales of taxi costs and being stranded in New Rochelle after hours reminded me of exactly why this is necessary, and for that, I couldn't be happier.

#cartography #community #communityactivism #mapping #gis #arcgis #map #geography #inspiration #progress #learning #westchestercounty #beeline