tigris (version 0.5)

landmarks: Download a point or area landmarks shapefile into R

Description

Description from the US Census Bureau: "The Census Bureau includes landmarks in the MAF/TIGER database (MTDB) for locating special features and to help enumerators during field operations. Some of the more common landmark types include area landmarks such as airports, cemeteries, parks, and educational facilities and point landmarks such as schools and churches."

Usage

landmarks(state, type = "point", year = NULL, ...)

Arguments

state

The state for which you'd like to download the landmarks

type

Whether you would like to download point landmarks ("point") or area landmarks ("area"). #' Defaults to "point".

year

the data year (defaults to 2015).

...

arguments to be passed to the underlying `load_tiger` function, which is not exported. Options include refresh, which specifies whether or not to re-download shapefiles (defaults to FALSE).

Details

The Census Bureau adds landmark features to the database on an as-needed basis and makes no attempt to ensure that all instances of a particular feature were included. The absence of a landmark such as a hospital or prison does not mean that the living quarters associated with that landmark were excluded from the 2010 Census enumeration. The landmarks were not used as the basis for building or maintaining the address list used to conduct the 2010 Census.

Area landmark and area water features can overlap; for example, a park or other special land-use feature may include a lake or pond. In this case, the polygon covered by the lake or pond belongs to a water feature and a park landmark feature. Other kinds of landmarks can overlap as well. Area landmarks can contain point landmarks, but these features are not linked in the TIGER/Line Shapefiles.

Landmarks may be identified by a MAF/TIGER feature class code only and may not have a name. Each landmark has a unique area landmark identifier (AREAID) or point landmark identifier (POINTID) value.

See Also

http://www2.census.gov/geo/pdfs/maps-data/data/tiger/tgrshp2015/TGRSHP2015_TechDoc_Ch3.pdf