This week I decided to do my map on the best vegetarian-friendly neighborhoods to live in West LA. What I found was, that without a doubt, it is Santa Monica. And not just anywhere in Santa Monica, but the area between Santa Monica blvd and Broadway, west of Bundy ave. As a vegetarian, I was not really surprised to find out this information, as some of my favorite restaurants, grocery stores, and farmer's markets are in this area.
I got my data for the map by looking up all the farmers markets in West LA first. I thought that these were usually a good indication of vegetarian friendly neighborhoods. Next, I plotted stores like Whole Foods and Co-Opportunity, which are different foods that make it easy to be a vegetarian, as well as sell fresh, organic produce. Then I added in restaurants that are specifically vegetarian or vegan, although more and more today there are a great many vegetarian options available at most restaurants. After putting these on an excel sheet, I added the information to the map. However, I first had to make an address locator. I did this by downloading a TIGER file of all the streets in LA, from the CALTRANS website. Then I told ArcGIS to use this layer as the base for the address locator, which it was able to. Then, I just used the geocoding option on ArcGIS to upload and find all my addresses. Then, I was able to label each of my places based on the name of the place, which I had added to the Excel file in a field called "type".
I will say that there is a very large benefit to using ArcGIS to geocode addresses, as it makes it so simple to upload them once you have made an address locator. Then, it is also very easy to label them and everything. There is a learning curve in getting to know how to work with the program, especially in making the address locator, but it wasn't impossible to figure out.
