update demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDJ3-j0hHnM
Municipal mergers are an often used solution to administrative inefficiency. By merging two municipalities, many of the costs of running two municipalities would then be one. There is debate over the effectiveness of such policies, however they have been successful with national, top-down policies (for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merger_(politics) ).
New Jersey has a lot of municipalities relative to its area. 565 to be exact. Due to New Jersey's high local and state taxes, there have been efforts to initiate municipal mergers as a possible solution.
I decided to try to model a state-wide merger policy that distributes geography evenly. The model takes a population minimum and merges until all new munis. meet the requirement. Town names are combined, new muncipal codes are crafted, and population and population density values are both re-calculated.
- Once I get this up and running as some sort of application...None! It is completely free of ESRI arcpy now. I am still deciding on how I plan to launch this. Much has to do with the database.
Now that ESRI and arcpy are no longer being used, the performance is literally expontially faster. No run takes more than 10-15 seconds, whereas the old methodology took over an hour.
Ideally, I'd like this tool to be used online, or as a downloadable program/app. Ideally ideally, it would be cool if people could use this as analysis tool for future policy. Triple ideally, it would really cool if I or other programmers could apply similar methods to other topics that relate to the Modifyable Areal Unit Problem. I'm thinking about looking at congressional districts next.