Fire Truck Response Times

The poster below compares fire truck response times in my hometown, Pembroke Massachusetts, under two scenarios. Scenario 1 assumes that all four of the town's fire stations are active. Scenario 2 assumes that the North Pembroke Station is closed due to town budget reasons and shows the difference in response times when compared to scenario 1. This has been an actual debate in the Town of Pembroke as the North Pembroke station is currently not staffed. Due to the industrialized nature of North Pembroke there has been concern that fire truck response time would be too long for the area in the event of a major fire at one of the commercial facilities. From the comparison, we can see that having the North Pembroke station open does improve the response time for the industrial areas down to the national standard of 5 minutes. There is, however, much overlapping in the southern portion of its service areas making it redundant in that area. All things considered for maximum safety, it would be an important asset to the town.

Distance Analysis for Massachusetts Community Colleges

The poster below compares two methods of visualizing distance using ArcMap, Network Analysis, and the Euclidean Distance Tool. Network Analysis uses established road networks to determine a driving distance from a set location, which was Massachusetts Community Colleges in this case. Euclidean Distance, could be considered "as the crow flies," and does not take road networks into account. As far as visual appeal and usefulness goes, it appears that Network Analysis provides the superior output. Because it takes road travel into account, it would be more useful to determine distances students or faculty would need to travel to get to individual community colleges in Massachusetts.

My GPS Map

Below is a map demonstrating the use of a GPS to geospatially track a route. This map shows route 14 which was the subject of field testing for my undergraduate research project. My goal was to track the change in air temperatures and relate it to the location's distance from the coast. However, because of the lack of a way to correspond temperature readings taken along with location, I used this method to approximate distances along the route. Each point, for runs 5 and 6 was taken at 1 minute intervals along the route travelling east and the pins represent the approximate distance between the two runs. This gave me an average location on the route allowing me to relate temperatures taken at a given location.
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