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2022 American Workplaces: Midwest (#8)

This mod adds POI's for the locations of American workplaces in 2022 and a custom demand curve to ensure the POI demand is centered around the locations Americans work and nearby residential areas. We use data from the 2022 LODES* data which measures Americans workplaces and residences to create a highly detailed of workplace locations.

This mod contains IL/KY/MN/WI.

* LODES meaning "LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics" for further details see https://lehd.ces.census.gov/applications/help/onthemap.html#!what_is_onthemap

We recommend subscribing to the full collection, enabling the “Job Curve” mod, and enabling the POI mods that cover the area of your network.

Broadly, this mod is more detailed, based on more recent data, and incorporates a commuter focused demand curve. Both Aminimus and this mods authors have released mods based the “Census Transportation Planning Products” based on employment locations in 2012-2016. This mod uses the most recent data, primarily from 2022, to reflect more current employment locations. Additionally, these mods use census block groups to identify locations in major metropolitan areas which are more precise than Census tracts used in prior mods**. We also incorporate a custom demand curve*** that ensures the demand generated from these POI are typical commuter distances and flow toward jobs in the morning and toward homes in the evening, which is more accurate to American commuting patterns compared to the default "population" curve present in NIMBY Rails.

** Block groups are essentially the second most "detailed" form of this data available, with the most detailed form being blocks, but this would have been impossible to implement in the game. Tracts are made up of block groups, and sometimes a tract may span 10+ block groups therefore giving an unrealistic "average" for the true location of workplaces and the consequent population.

*** This custom demand curve was made by Paul Fisher using LODES data, looking at real life average commuting patterns of Americans, distance travelled, time spent commuting, etc, to create an accurate representation of what an "average" commuter might look like, then putting this data into NIMBY Rails, this is quite the simplification, but you should get the general idea.

Please contact JJRol or Paul Fisher on the NIMBY Rails discord with questions or bug reports.