County/City Driving Distance Dataset and Map

Author: Jeff Erickson <jeff@erick.so>

Date: 2014-09-13

Introduction

This is a dataset that has the driving distance (in km, according to Google Maps API) between every county population centroid in the lower 48 and each major U.S. city with over 2 million people in its primary statistical area.

For information on how this dataset was created, please see this README.

The Dataset

The dataset contains 102,597 rows: one row per U.S. county (in the lower 48 states) per major U.S. city.

The variables include:

1. fips: the FIPS code of the county
2. city_id: the ID code of the city, as defined in this key
3. county_name: the name of the county
4. state_name: the name of the state that the county is in
5. county_lat: the latitude of the population centroid of the county
6. county_long: the longitude of the population centroid of the county
7. city_rank: the rank of the population of the city
8. city_name: the name and state of the city
9. city_long: the longitude of the city
10. city_lat: the latitude of the city
11. driving_distance: the driving distance, in km, according to Google Maps API, between the city and the county population centroid
12. shortest_flag: a flag indicating if this is the closest city for each county population centroid

Mapping the Results

To help visualize this data, here is a map of the z-score of the shortest driving distance for each county:

Large PDF

Extension: Driving Distance and its Relation to Rurality

For more information on this topic, please see the County Density/Distance/Population Map.