ArcCollector: Sunday Church Parking around Randall Park

Introduction:

This lab works as an extension to the previous lab on the class collective ArcCollector project. In this lab, students create their own ArcCollector mapping projects and experiment with the use of domains while building individual databases which will host the collected point feature class data of their choice. 

The project which was ultimately decided upon for field study was the influence that Sunday morning church mass has on parking in the Randall Park area, as seen in Figure 1. The park area is host of two separate church affiliations with First Baptist Church located on the corner of Fourth and Niagara Streets, and First Congressional Church located on the opposite corner of Third and Broadway Street. Both churches hold regular Sunday Mass sessions at 9:00 am and 10:30 am, making parking impossible to find in these hours. By noon, however, parking density usually subsides to its regular patterns. This lab attempts to capture the congestion of parking on the Park block as it occurs regularly on Sunday mornings, and attempts to capture the distribution of cars parking locations in relation to their corresponding church affiliation. 

Figure 1: Map of the Study Area

Methods:

Before any data could be collected from the field, students first had to set up their geodatabases to host the data points. After creating a new file geodatabase in ArcCatalog, students moved to ArcMap to set the geodatabase domain properties. Domains are set to restrict the entry options available for input in the field as an attempt to reduce data variations and user error. Domains also make it easier to classify the data during later use in querying and symbolizing specific attribute details. For the purpose of the Randall Park Project, attributes set included Church Affiliation, Notes, Streets, Time, and Vehicle Type. Most of the domains used coded text values. "Time" was the only exception, this option using short integer values. Options for Church Affiliation included First Baptist, United Methodist, First Congressional, Unknown, or None. Options for Vehicle Type were limited to Car, Truck, Van, or SUV.

Figure 2: Database Domain Properties

The next step required the creation of a point feature class, in this instance named 'parkedvehicles.' The Projected Coordinate System used was the WGS 1984 Web Mercator (auxiliary sphere) to account for the latitude and longitudinal point location readings in the field. A field was created within the point feature class relating to each of the domains listed in the figure above. Finally, the geodatabase was prepared to be uploaded to ESRI's ArcGIS online platform for connection to the ArcCollector App, and the mapped data could be accessed in the field.

Field data was collected on three separate hours to account for the parked car traffic around the Park's block. These time slots included 9:00 am, 11:00 am, (to account for the 9;00 am and 10:30 am masses) and 12:00 pm (to account for normal distribution of parking traffic). The results are provided in the next section.

Results:

The embedded map linked below in Figure 3 shows the overall distribution of points collected around the Randall Park area over the course of the three observed hours. 

                   Figure 3: Randall Park Distribution of Parked Cars



Figure 4 shows the distribution of cars and their corresponding church affiliations at the three different recorded hours. The maps provided show clustering around the Park block with parking on both sides of the street for the first two collections, while the last map shows an example of what regular street parking looks like around this block. It appears that both the 9:00 am and 10:30 am mass sessions are equally popular in terms of attendance. While it was difficult to track where every car's passengers diverted to after parking, it seems that most of First Baptist's attendees tended to park on Fourth and Niagara Streets while First Congressional attendee's occupied Broadway and Third Street.

Figure 4: Map of Collected Church Parking Data

Conclusion: 

The results from the collection of this data shows the congestion in parking availability that occurs around the Randall Park area every Sunday morning. For those who live in the area and have to rely on road side parking, this can prove to be an issue during these time frames. Diverting the traffic to other areas in the neighborhood could help to better relieve the parking congestion that occurs around the park block .