Threshold Areas

Overview

Threshold areas create polygons around your stores. The radius of the polygon is determined by expanding from the store location until it meets your criteria. The polygons can be concentric rings or drive-time areas.

You can choose any layer and any field in that layer to use in creating rings. Typically, the Block Points layer is used. It contains population, households, housing units, and business counts. You can also use any of the Business Analyst Datasources, such as block groups, or even your own data as part of a BDS layer. Business Analyst automatically uses block point data aggregation to more accurately define the threshold areas.

Input Prerequisites

Any point file or files.

Example Output

In the example below, rings are drawn when a 150,000 and 300,000 population threshold is reached. Both simple rings and drive times are used to retrieve the population statistics from the same site. The simple ring method uses a Euclidean distance outward from the starting site. The drive-time method traverses the underlying streets database working outward until the criteria are satisfied.

Conseil :

The drive-time option is processing intensive in comparison to the simple rings.

Learn more about Threshold Areas.