GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems. NIRPC utilizes GIS technology to meet the comprehensive requirements of transportation planning, environmental resource planning, land use planning, and economic development initiatives. Realizing the importance of collaboration in these planning domains, NIRPC employs a variety of data that has been used in the development of the 2040 Comprehensive Regional Plan.
GIS offers the ability to combine geographical features with tabular data to assess real-world problems. Increasingly, geographic data are being used to enhance the decision-making processes across many agencies. GIS helps to inform all decision makers in the Northwest Indiana region.
NIRPC uses ESRI’s ArcMap and other ESRI extensions to do its GIS analysis. Data is collected from planning partners and a variety of other GIS data sources to be used in the NIRPC GIS.
GIS projects at NIRPC have included a regional land use inventory, motorized and non-motorized crash and safety data analysis, demographic and economic data analysis, traffic count display, livable centers analysis, and various other projects that serve to help inform the public of our region’s changes and challenges.