Project 4 Week 2: Assigning Delivery Areas for Wine Customers

This week we had to divide Napa County into three parts. three ways. First we divided the number of wine customers (290) and their sales. The first slicing of the county (no name attached) was by number of customers and sales: each third on the map had to include 95-97 customers and 1/3 of the total county wine sales, +-5%. The next, called Territory 1, was just a straight geographic division, using straight lines (they all intersected near the densely-populated south-central portion of hte county. The final slicing (called Territory 2) attempted to divide the county using roads as the boundaries, preferably major roads. I had to use one minor road for this. A link to the resulting powerpoint is attached: http://students.uwf.edu/db27/BayArea/Week2WineDeliverable.ppt

and above is a graphic just for the sake of decoration: (this is the first one, equal sales and equal numbers of vendors):

One of the interesting things about this was how little tweaking is needed to change the figures considerably and skew the sales over to one section or another, because of the density of stores and restaurants in the south-central region. My territories 1 and 2 didn't do a great job of equalizing customers and sales, although it's clear that it wouldn't be hard to do that. A more thorny issue is that the South area, under the current criteria (number of customers and total sales potential), benefits unfairly because deliveries would take a lot less time given how close the markets are to one another.



I had a fair amount of trouble with this one because I missed a note about the need to edit the "Territory" column (to reapportion areas from Northwest to Northeast, or South to Northwest, or whatever) after each new set of boundaries was created. Eventually I figured that out, but there were a couple of "ghost" points - one because it fell outside the Napa County shapefile boundary line, another for no reason that I could see - that were also confusing. I am getting better at editing things in ArcMap though, which is a relief. This week also did bring home how useful it must be to be competent in programming, to avoid having to do the same thing over and over and over and over...