Improving access to healthy ready-made food options for seniors and low income residents

By Kelly Blanton

Introduction

This project is trying to determine the best route to grocery stores that have healthy food

made in store. Whole Foods Market is a grocery store that currently offers a variety of pre-

cooked or oven ready foods for a variety of special diets as well as traditional omnivores. Whole

Foods Market offers recipes and meal plans for anyone wanting to eat healthy. The Health Starts

Here program offers help to anyone wanting to create or eat healthy meals. Meals in the

refrigerated section are marked with HLH purple stickers to show they are part of the program,

this makes shopping easy. Seniors sometimes on fixed incomes buy groceries that are

inexpensive but not nutrient rich and health. Others would eat healthy but don’t want to prepare a

meal, having access to healthy premade meals will improve health and food access.

Value to Others

This project is interesting to me because I am interested in transit systems and a big fan

of Whole Foods. This project is a nexus of my three passions, social justice, transit and healthy

foods choices. Currently, Capital Metro only runs an HEB shopper shuttle route, I would like to

expand the options for riders to be able to go to Whole Foods Market also. A Whole Foods

Market Shopper Route is what I would like to create. The value for others will be greater access

for seniors and low income residents to healthy food options that do not require any cooking

knowledge as well as sustainable ingredients. Eating healthy, helps reduce or even get rid of

many medical ailments and improves your quality of life by being able to be more active so you

can visit family or have a picnic with friends.

Geographic Concepts

The geographic concepts I used to analyze my problem were distance, direction and

orientation, scale and topology. My main question is how far are things from other things?

Distance was the main concept I used. The absolute locations of grocery stores and apartment

complexes would be in coordinates like this and relative locations would be names such as

Whole Foods Market, Lamar Blvd. Austin Texas. Locations of things are very important as

geography is the study of place and location both relative and absolute is a big part, Google maps

is famous for introducing the concept of distances to everyone as well as orientation and scale

but you can pan around the screen and zoom in and out. Direction was also used I needed to find

where the grocery stores were in relation to apartment complexes, it was discovered that they

were mostly clustered toward south Austin.

My study area was on a small scale as I only studied a small part of Austin, the relative

location is between Central Market-Westgate and Tamabaleo 2208 apartments. Topology was

also an important concept in my network analysis. Adjacent roads were found and used to create

the fastest route also connectivity was important how many alternate routes could I take if say

there were barriers such as traffic and the bus needed to reroute to stay on schedule but still stop

at all needed stops. My project utilized many topological factors to find the best route but it

would be cool to take into account slope/grade to find the shortest way for bicyclists.

Data and Methodology

I collected secondary data from a variety of internet sources. First I went to the Capital

Metro website and downloaded GIS data for all the bus routes and bus stops and then I clipped

and selected out the route and stops for the Route 490-HEB Shuttle which is the current shopper

route then I went to Capital Area Council of Governments and downloaded Census data for

demographics for Austin as well as major transit corridors and Imagine Austin corridors. I then

went to the City of Austin GIS data and got Travis County boundary and major roads and streets.

I added all these layers to the map. I clipped my study area to Austin and then turned on the

labels for transit corridors to show major roads. I also clipped my streets file to Austin so it

wouldn’t be so large and then proceeded to create a new network data set for my analysis

because the class one was for Bexar county.

I got the streets.nd file to use for my network data set and selected the defaults but the

attribute table was missing time so Dr. Currit assisted Lauren Johnson, TA to find the cause of

the problem and it was solved. I did a series of python statements in raster calculator to find

hours minutes and seconds, then I turned the selections on in properties. I used google to

research areas of need based and low income housing near my selected stores and used find to

locate them add them as a stop. Once I added all my network points I solve the route and turned

on the find optimal route, preserve first and last stop button in network properties. I then created

a map of the route as seen in Figure 1. I then inserted some line barriers around the intersection

of SH 290/S. Capitol of Texas Highway and Lamar Blvd. to simulate a traffic jam and re solved

the route. I created a new map of this as shown in Figure 2.

Description of Analysis

I used a couple of different analysis techniques to solve my project problem. I first did a

clip of my Capital Metro layer to select on the Route 490-HEB shuttle and then clipped my

counties file to Austin. I also did clips of my streets and roads layer to get only Austin streets and

roads as I had a small portion I needed. I then cleaned up the attribute tables hiding columns I did

not need for my analysis. I then performed my network analysis. I chose the 6 apartment

complexes, Central Market-Westgate and Wheatsville Co-op because I wanted to make a

efficient route with fast service home so perishable groceries would not go bad.

Conclusions

I originally started this project to create a route for disabled, seniors and low income

residents to have access to ready-made meals with sustainable healthy ingredients from Whole

Foods Market. Whole Foods Markets tend to be in higher income areas and so the distances from

the low income housing to Whole Foods was greater than to a HEB or Central Market. I did not

take into account local grocery stores which might have been in walking distance. I focused on

stores I knew had pre made meals. Wheatsville Co-op and Central Market-Westgate were the

closest to the selected locations and provided a variety of foods at affordable prices.

For future research I would like to focus on many different ideas. I would like to take into

account other parts of Austin like east Austin and find out if a route could be feasible. Since east

Riverside is currently the only area served by the HEB shuttle. I would like to use census income

and demographic data to do a more in depth study of areas in need. I would also love to expand

my parameters to all residences that are low income not just apartments that are designated low

income, however this may be unfeasible as it would be more like a paratransit/metroaccess trip to

serve single family homes instead on a route but it could also be a sort of limited stop service

that could be part of the premium service category, the fare increase however might dissuade

needed ridership and so more data would be needed.

References

Capital Metro https://www.capmetro.org/datastats.aspx?id=129

City of Austin GIS ftp://ftp.ci.austin.tx.us/GIS-Data/Regional/coa_gis.html

CAPCOG http://www.capcog.org/data-maps-and-reports/maps/

Figure 1

Figure 2