For those of you that are still unclear on what exactly my newly choosen GIS career entails, I think this write-up I prepared for the county engineer will give you a pretty good idea of what GIS is and how I use it.

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Salt Storage Location Methodology

This document outlines the assumptions and conclusions regarding the “best” location of an additional salt storage facility in Kane County.

The initial plan for scoring the 153,548 parcels in the county for a new salt storage location was to maximize the distance away from existing salt storage locations while simultaneously minimizing the cumulative distance to county roads.

The first step of the methodology of assigning a score for a given parcel was to first determine the distance from that parcel to the nearest existing salt storage location.

The second step of the process was to sum the distance from the parcel to each of the 1,278 county road segments. The idea is that the smaller this cumulative distance, the more accessible a parcel will be to county roads.

With these two pieces of information calculated for all 153,548 parcels in the county, a score was assigned to each parcel by dividing the distance to the nearest existing salt storage location by the cumulative distance from that parcel to all county road segments. The larger the numerator (distance to existing salt location) the higher the score will be, and the smaller the denominator (cumulative distance to county roads) the higher the score will also be.

Looking at the attached map of the entire county the scores seem to be arranged almost entirely by a parcel’s proximity to an existing salt storage location. This indicates that the county roads are evenly distributed across the county and that county road proximity is not a useful input as used in the above methodology.

A limiting factor in the above methodology is that the number of lanes of each road is not analyzed. If lanes were factored into the above methodology I would predict a grouping of parcels with higher scores in the southeast corner of the county near the multilane roads Randall Road, Orchard Road, Kirk Road, and Fabyan Parkway.

With this in mind I am recommending a new salt storage location in an area of southeast Kane County that scored in the highest tier from the initial analysis. The location is a triangular area along either side of Kirk Road and from Fabyan Road south about two miles. [See attached detail map]