Twin Cities Metro Area Road Surface Area, 2022

Abstract

This high-resolution (1 meter) raster represents road surface area for streets (including alleys) in the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan area. Minnesota roads data contributing to this layer is compiled from several state and county agencies and accessed through the Minnesota Geospatial Commons. The Minnesota Transportation Department (MNDOT) Lane Information dataset was spatially joined with MNDOT centerlines from 2012 in order to link the Transportation Information System (TIS) ID codes for road segments with the lane information on number of through transit lanes and width of lanes. The resulting layer was then joined on the TIS code attribute with the Geospatial Advisory Council Schema road centerlines shapefile from MetroGIS. To avoid a many-to-one join, MNDOT road segments were grouped by their TIS code and the average lane width and number were summarized to make the layer compatible with the MetroGIS centerlines shapefile. Once the centerline route segment IDs were linked to the MNDOT transit lane information, the centerlines were buffered based on their average width attribute, multiplied by the number of lanes. Alleys were identified and assigned a width of 5 meters based on typical alley width measurements using satellite imagery. Due to transportation identification system scope, confidence in accuracy of private road surface area is diminished. The resulting buffered road segment vectors were rasterized and cropped to the seven-county metro area (Hennepin, Ramsey, Anoka, Washington, Dakota, Scott, and Carver County).