The following script was written by me as part of my master’s thesis research, which aimed to forecast the impacts on Hartford, Connecticut, of visitors to the new Coltsville National Historical Park in that city. The script allocates the additional jobs attributable to visitor spending throughout the study area (the city of Hartford) by means of a singly-constrained gravity model. Inputs to the model are the job numbers under various scenarios, travel times from the new park to the various zones (census blocks or block groups) of the study area, a “friction coefficient” representing travel cost, and each zone’s attractiveness index (derived from that zone’s amount of developable land and existing population). The output of the script is an Excel spreadsheet with the number of jobs allocated to each zone.
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