3Design and Analysis

I started work on the project with an outline of
what I wanted to do. I had to spend many hours of
my time in planning exactly what to do and how to do
it. Due to lack of time to spend on the project, I
wanted to make this project as efficient as possible.
Thus I decided to do my data analysis in such a way
as to reduce the amount of digitizing. For example, I
only digitized the relevent bus routes, and ignored any
routes for buses that happened to coincide with other
bus or Skytrain routes.

Another technique I used was the idea of digitizing only
relevent areas of Parks and Shopping stores. I obviously
did not want to digitize every single small park in the
GVRD since this would take a long time. (Same for
every location of Safeway stores, etc.) I thus left the
digitizing of these points to the end once I had a particular
area of the lower mainland narrowed down to live in.
After that I digitized any parks and stores near this area to
narrow down my 'optimum' area even further.

My project intersected the following coverages to come up with the best places to live in the Lower Mainland:

1. Transit Routes (including all bus routes that go to Leigh's workplace, all Skytrain stations, most 99 B-Line stations, and all other relevent buses that could be used to connect to a route to Leigh's work) This resulted in the following map of transit routes, with routes shown in burgundy colour:
 
 

 
 

2. Residential Areas (This coverage contained all areas of the GVRD where houses, townhouses, and low-rise apartments exist) This resulted in the following map, with residential areas shown in green:
 
 

3. Shopping Areas (This coverage was composed of 0.6km buffers around all major shopping malls and Safeway, Superstore, Save-On Foods, and IGA Stores locations) This map, with shopping areas denoted in purple, looks like this:
 

4. Parks (This coverage was composed of 1km buffers around parks locations near relevent areas derived from the above four intersections) Here is a map of the Parks buffers, with parks areas buffers shown in light green:
 

This intersection of the above four coverages resulted in my final results: The best places for Leigh to live in the GVRD.