PrintThe need to redraw voting district boundaries every ten years was one of the motivations that led the Census Bureau to create its MAF/TIGER database. Like voting districts, many other kinds of service area boundaries need to be revised periodically. School districts are a good example. The state of Massachusetts, for instance, has adopted school districting laws that are similar in effect to the constitutional criteria used to guide congressional redistricting. The Framingham (Massachusetts) School District's Racial Balance Policy once stated that "each elementary and middle school shall enroll a student body that is racially balanced. ... each student body shall include a percentage of minority students, which reflects the system-wide percentage of minority students, plus or minus ten percent. ... The racial balance required by this policy shall be established by redrawing school enrollment areas" (Framingham Public Schools 1998). Particularly in places with policies like this, each time districts are redrawn, the students and locations served by the buses also changes. Thus, the routes must also be reanalyzed and optimized.
Another example of service area analysis is provided by the City of Beaverton, Oregon. In 1997, Beaverton officials realized that 25 percent of the volume of solid waste that was hauled away to land fills consisted of yard waste, such as grass clippings and leaves. Beaverton decided to establish a yard waste recycling program, but it knew that the program would not be successful if residents found it inconvenient to participate. A GIS procedure was used to partition Beaverton's street network into service areas that minimized the drive time from residents' homes to recycling facilities. Beaverton’s yard waste recycling program has since been updated and at the time of this writing includes curbside pickup.