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    The criteria used in the determination of suitable locations of a new skate park in this multiple-criteria evaluation are proximity to public transportation (bus stops and SkyTrain), distance from railway tracks, high density of males 10 to 19, and exiting park locations. The reason why I chose proximity to transit is because the users need to get to the new skate park and most users do not have access to private transportation as most users are too young to hold a drivers licence. The reason why I choose distance from railway tracks is because railway tracks can be a safety hazard near a skate park and can lead to a insurance liability. The reason why I choose high density of males 10 to19 is because the demographic that uses skate parks the most are males between the ages of 10 and 19. The reason why I choose existing park locations is because municipalities want to add skate parks to existing park land.
   
    The data that was used for the multi-criteria evaluation for this geographic information science project was acquired from the data that had been accumulated by the geographic information science program at Simon Fraser University, which was placed on their network drive in the spatial information systems computer lab. This is where the GVRD 2001 data on land use patterns, TransLink bus stop data, TransLink SkyTrain data, GVRD railway data, and all the Census 2001 data came from.

    The GVRD land use data contained sixteen land use categories, and the one of interest to me was the recreational and protected natural areas as this was the closest data I could get for parks for the entire GVRD. This vector ArcGIS shapefile was converted to Idrisi in order to perform the spatial analysis. This was accomplished by converting the GVRD land use shapefile to a raster file in ArcGIS and then converting the raster file to an ASCII text file. At this point it was possible to import the ASCII text file into Idrisi while specifying the UTM Zone 10N projection. To view this raster image click here.

    The TransLink data folder contained four different shapefiles that contained bus stop point data in the GVRD. These four shapefiles were combined into one shapefile. The TransLink data folder also contained a shapefile of the SkyTrain route. These two vector ArcGIS shapefiles were converted to Idrisi in order to perform the spatial analysis. While specifying the UTM Zone 10N projection all that needed to be done for both shapefiles was to use the import function in Idrisi. To view these two raster images click here.

    The GVRD railway vector shapefile was converted to Idrisi in order to perform the spatial analysis. While specifying the UTM Zone 10N projection all that needed to be done was to use the import function in Idrisi. To view this raster images click here.

    The Census 2001 data contained two categories that were of importance to this multi-criteria evaluation, which were the total population of males ages 10 to 14 living in each dissemination area and the total number of males aged 15 to 19 living in each dissemination area. I choose to use each of these categories separately instead of combining them, because when they are used in the multi-criteria evaluation it will find the areas that have the highest population density for both age groups. In order to use the Census 2001 data I needed to take the available spatial shapefile in ArcGIS and join to it the attribute values for each of the dissemination areas. This was done by acquiring the attribute values using the Canadian Census Analyser available from the University of Toronto website (http://datacentre.chass.utoronto.ca/census/). This attribute data was then imported into Microsoft Excel in order to transform the data in to a format that would work in ArcGIS. Each of the two Census 2001 attribute data joined to the corresponding spatial data was converted to Idrisi in order to perform the spatial analysis. This was accomplished by converting the Census 2001 shapefile to a raster file in ArcGIS based on each of the two male age population categories ending up with two separate raster files. Then each of the raster files was separately converted to an ASCII text file. At this point it was possible to import each of the ASCII text files into Idrisi while specifying the UTM Zone 10N projection. To view each of the raster images click here.

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