[acs-r] Getting all zipcodes in the continental US

[Ezra Haber Glenn]

Ari:

Good question.  Here are some thoughts on how to approach it:

Your idea of creating something with geo.make(zip.code= "*"), and then
modifying, if a great idea, but unfortunately it won't work: the
geo.set that you create with a wildcard is pretty dumb -- it just
contain the wildcard, not all the geographies that it matches to.  

Nonetheless, it's a good start, and can be used to get those
geographies through a simple acs.fetch.  Try this:

> my.geos=geo.make(zip.code="*")

# the actual table number doesn't really matter here 
> some.data=acs.fetch(geography=my.geos, table.number="B01003") 

Now we have an acs.object, called some.data, that *does* include all
the geographic info we need.  We can view it with 

# careful -- the whole thing is really long; 
# let's just look at the first few rows
> head(geography(some.data))
         NAME zipcodetabulationarea
1 ZCTA5 01001                 01001
2 ZCTA5 01002                 01002
3 ZCTA5 01003                 01003
4 ZCTA5 01005                 01005
5 ZCTA5 01007                 01007
6 ZCTA5 01008                 01008

We can capture the "zipcodetabulationarea" values and use some subset
of them to make a new geo.make:

> sample.zips=geo.make(zip.code=sample(geography(some.data)$zipcodetabulationarea, 100))

Unfortunately, if you try to make a geo.set with *all* of them, you
get that same error you encountered -- it has to do with the way the
function uses nested recursive loops, which may be less-than-ideal in
theory, but in practice is fine.  (I think the upper limit may be
around 700 or 800 items.)  To get around this, you could create your
geo.set in multiple pieces, and then combine them with "geo.set.a +
geo.set.b" of something similar.

But all that said, I'd warn you that the acs.fetch command is *very*
slow with very large geo.sets -- each one needs to be individually
fetched, and then the results assembled.  (This is one reason why the
limit of geo.set size at creation is not really a big problem from my
point of view.)  Far better is to just use the wildcard and then
*remove* the rows that you don't want (i.e., select and remove the
ones for Alaska and Hawaii, in this case).  Would that work?

--Ezra

At Sun, 13 Apr 2014 13:57:32 -0400, arilamstein wrote:
> 
> I am trying to use geo.make to create a geography of all zip codes /
> zctas in the continental US.  This is slightly challenging because the
> documentation to geo.make says that if you specify the zip.code
> parameter then no other geographies can be selected.
> 
> My solution is to use the zipcode package to create a list of all
> zipcodes in the continental us, and then pass that to geo.make.
> However, this creates an error:
> 
> library(maps) library(zipcode) data(zipcode)
> 
> states_continental = setdiff(state.abb, c("AK", "HI"))
> states_continental = c(states_continental, "DC") zips =
> zipcode[zipcode$state %in% states_continental, "zip"]
> 
> geo = geo.make(zip.code=zips) Error: evaluation nested too deeply:
> infinite recursion / options(expressions=)?  Error during wrapup:
> evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion /
> options(expressions=)?
> 
> I tried to step thru the geo.make code but was not sure how it worked.
> I suspect the error is that the zipcode package includes valid zips
> that are not zctas (e.g. zip codes that refer to post offices), and
> that might cause a problem.  But I am wondering if there is a bug in
> the acs code, or if there is a better way to get the result I am
> looking for.
> 
> As a workaround, is there an easy way to remove elements from the
> result of geo.make(zip.code= "*")?  The resulting object is an S4
> object, which I don't have experience with.  If the result were a
> data.frame I could just use subsetting against the zips variable I
> have above.  But I am not sure how to do the equivalent operation with
> the resulting S4 object.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Ari
> 
> 

--
Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
Cambridge, MA 02139
eglenn at mit.edu 
http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn | http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
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