Week 2 Lab

This lab focuses on the 50 closest Taco Bell locations to my apartment. I found the addresses of these Taco Bell’s on their website in a location finder. On the map above you can see all 50 locations, a ½ mile buffer zone around each, the mean center of the Taco Bell’s, a point showing the location of my apartment and major highways. I chose this topic because Taco Bell is my favorite fast food and being as I don’t have a car, it is important that I know where a near Taco Bell is. Additionally I wanted to know some information regarding the clustering of Taco Bell.

Upon making this map I soon realized that Taco bell’s in Los Angeles are practically everywhere. This led me to my first question: ‘How many of these Taco Bells are within one mile of each other?’ in order to answer this question I created a ½ mile buffer zone around each Taco Bell. When the buffer zones intersect it means that the two corresponding Taco Bells are within a mile of each other. I found 11 Taco Bells that were within a mile from another Taco Bell. After doing this I made a buffer layer with dissolved boundaries to better show which fit the criteria.

Additionally I thought it was interesting to see that many of the Taco Bells were pretty far from my apartment. This then made me wonder where the mean center of these 50 Taco Bells was. Using the spatial statistics tools, I was able to measure geographic distributions and plot the mean center on the map.