Dig into regional data, create maps with Council’s interactive Maps tools

Do you know the latest population numbers for your city? Are there more jobs than people in your hometown? Does the neighboring suburb have a higher concentration of parks?

Council GIS staffer Jessica Deegan creates a map using the “make-a-map” feature on the Council’s online Maps page.

Find answers – quickly and easily – by visiting the Metropolitan Council’s new online Maps resource. The interactive Maps web pages give users speedy access to the Council’s comprehensive collection of regional data – as well as data specific to cities, townships and counties within the metropolitan area.

With Maps, users can:

Find profiles of every community in the seven-county area
Design maps customized to their own needs
Access a gallery of more than 1,000 existing maps prepared by the Council

“This will be a great resource for community planners,” said Patrick Boylan, planner and sector representative in the Council’s Local Planning Assistance unit. “The Maps site makes it easier to access the vast array of regional data we have at the Council. It will be particularly helpful when planners want to get a handle on land use and other data in neighboring communities.”

Access the community profiles

To create Maps, a team of the Council’s geographic information systems (GIS) staff catalogued and polished the Council’s databases, designed a user-friendly portal, and set up safeguards that ensure visitors obtain credible and up-to-date information. Want to know what’s “hot” in the region? Maps provides a “most requested” list at the bottom right corner of the page.

To answer common questions, the team developed community profiles that provide quick summaries for each county and community in the region, as well as for the region as a whole. “We wanted the profiles to be easy to understand, and in a form most people would recognize, so they look a lot like a page in an atlas,” said project leader Alison Slaats.

To find a particular community profile, visitors may select from a drop-down menu or click on the interactive map. After a one-time-per-session disclaimer, continued clicks allow users to “drill down” to the smallest summarized area, an individual community.

Profile page summaries list total land area, parks acreage, population, households, and jobs; the summaries link to city or county websites, key Metropolitan Council contacts and more. Visitors may select additional topics from a drop-down menu located beneath the profile table.

Community profiles, like this one for the City of St. Paul, provide brief overviews of local data and link directly to local government websites. Each profile page includes a community map with a link to the make-a-map feature, as well as links to land-use data and population, household and employment data. See the full St. Paul profile page.

Design your own maps

Slightly more sophisticated users may prefer to make a map customized to their needs. Options include more than 100 data layers, sorted by topic. Visitors can print the resulting map at their home or office, and save the map for future use.

Aerial photos, natural resources, historical populations, roads and transit routes are just a few of the layers offered in make a map. Slaats cautions users new to the technology that “choosing everything could get a bit overwhelming.” Narrowing the choices to a few will keep the maps simple enough to be useful, she advised.

Choose from the Council’s map gallery

More than 1,000 maps form a map gallery of projects previously prepared for Council uses. The maps range from the latest transportation improvement projects to old inventories of park lands. The GIS team organized the gallery by “community” and “topic” choices; visitors can opt to print or order maps of their choice.

“(Maps) provides a great tool for GIS professionals, for communities that may not have the resources to hire professional GIS staff, and for anyone who wants to know more about their community,” said Slaats. “I’ve found it useful when I’ve had a question about my own neighborhood.”

Maps launched on Nov. 29 as part of the Council’s redesigned website. The team views it as a work in progress, and welcomes comments and suggestions.

What exactly is a GIS?

Geographic information systems technology and data are largely unknown or invisible to the average citizen, but they are ubiquitous in government. Generally, GIS professionals labor behind the scenes in what many would consider a foreign language – developing complex databases used as “layers” on maps, linking specified features to their geographic locations. During the last decade GIS resources have become common to daily life.

For example, GIS maps help emergency responders find hydrants before they reach a fire. Realtors may use GIS maps to locate schools and parks near homes for sale. GIS data help developers estimate costs to protect natural resources. In government, GIS maps quantify current conditions, illustrate trends and project impacts for proposed projects. They are used in efforts as diverse as constructing sewers, preventing crime, monitoring airport noise and planning school-bus routes.

Learn more about GIS in the metropolitan area.