Introduction
Coffee shops have become a facet of everyday life in Vancouver, and contribute to a strong community and social network of people (Deutscher and Fels, n.d). Due to the importance that coffee shops play in the social environment in Vancouver and in my life I decided to do a mutli-criteria evaluation of the best place to locate a new coffee shop in Vancouver. Coffee is the main drink consumed in coffee shops, as the name suggests, and attracts the most amount of customers, who then purchase food and other goods such as newspapers. Coffee shops offer people a place to sit and relax on weekends, talk to colleagues, hold job interviews and business meetings, study and pick up a quick drink or bite to eat (GIbbs 2000). Leyden (2003) also states that coffee shops lead to greater community life and contribute to making neighbourhoods more walkable. Coffee shops are an intergral part of a community and the social make up of a neighbourhood.
This project focuses on the best locations to open a new coffee shop in Vancouver based on a number of factors and constraints using a multi-criteria evaluation. With todays new technologies it is becoming easy to find the relationship between objects, such as bus stops and coffee shops (Pradhan, 2000). In this project GIS software IDRISI and ArcMap are used to do spatial analysis of different factors in Vancouver to find the best location for a new coffee shop.
Anyone attempting to locate a new coffee shop must take into account many different factors and constraints that they feel to be the most important qualities. This project uses a multi-criteria evaluation to rank the areas of Vancouver that are most suitable for a new coffee shop location. The factors and constraints chosen were:
- Landuse
- Population
- Major roads
- Skytrain stations
- Bus stops
- Income
- Number of people who do not drive to work
- Starbucks locations
The reason that these factors and constraints were chosen is due to the fact that I believe they are the most significant aspects for choosing were a new coffee shop should be located in Vancouver. King et. al (2003) states that people are not willing to walk for more then 20 minutes to find a coffee shop and as result four of the factors in the MCE are based on distance, to accomdate for peoples prerference about proximity of coffee shops.
This project will use a multi-criteria evaluation in IDRISI to create a suitability map of the best areas to locate a new coffee shop in Vancouver.