0

I need to display U.S. metro areas on a map and overlay some other data on the map. I have google searched for the metro data but I can't seem to find any good sources.

I was hoping to find data that I could use to display polygons of each metro area region on a map. I am using a Bing Maps Control to display the map but I'm not 100% tied to it.

I found a possible sources here https://mapzen.com/data/metro-extracts/ but the shape data looks huge for what I need. 22mb for one region?

I also found some data from opendata here http://opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/0ca49e3a5476488f98a8b1d2a81899e4_8?geometry=-130.807%2C26.621%2C-56.979%2C51.777&uiTab=table&selectedAttributes%5B%5D=MTFCC&chartType=bar&filterByExtent=true&mapSize=map-maximize&orderByFields=OID+DESC which looks like what I want but I can't get the data to download.

I'm assuming there has to be a good source for this data somewhere.

Any other suggestions where to get the metro area polygon(kml..shapefile..etc) data?

Eric
  • 958
  • 1
  • 11
  • 28

3 Answers3

1

If you want boundaries of cities, Bing Maps actually makes these available through the GeoData API: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn306801.aspx This would let you retrieve the boundaries for individual cities.

If you need all these boundaries in a single file, the US Census makes a file available: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/cbf/cbf_ua.html It's 9mb when zipped, unzipped it is 27MB which is about the same size as the data sets you have come across. It is possible to reduce the size of these and also convert them to other formats. I would recommend using GeoJSON over Shapefiles and KML. GeoJSON is much more popular than these other formats now and is much better suited for web based applications.

Looking into this data I see that there is over 3000 polygons. You will struggle to get any web based mapping application to render that may polygons. Especially when each polygon has a decent number of polygons.

I created a low resolution version of this data that is accurate to about 1km. It is a little over 2MB when unzipped. You can find the zipped GeoJSON file here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=D35222484A76A01!406125&authkey=!ALpJIthBQ-MroSI&ithint=file%2czip

rbrundritt
  • 16,570
  • 2
  • 21
  • 46
0

The official source for information about U.S. metro areas (Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas) is the CensusBureau You may need to combine the resources there with official county boundary shapefiles.

jwd630
  • 4,529
  • 1
  • 20
  • 22
0

You could use Google Maps API for Android to get images of U.S. metro areas.

If you want a polygon that is more than a simple square or rectangle, which it sounds like you do, you can specify coordinates for a polygon to obtain an image for your app. Sounds like quite a lot of work, but it is possible. See details here:

https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android-api/shapes

joshgoldeneagle
  • 4,616
  • 2
  • 23
  • 30