census-cb

census-cb is a wrapper for downloading and processing Cartography Boundaries from the US Census Bureau. It stands for Census Cartographic Boundaries; apparently that's confusing (but, like most things, it made sense at the time).

The goal of census-cb is to provide an easy way to get GIS information created by the United States Census Bureau. There's a wide variety of cartographic files availbable for download, such as state and county lines, voting district, Tribal subdivisions, and more!

Entity Information

There are a designated set of entities available for download from the census bureau. Each year of available data has a specific set of available entities, and the shape of these entities may change from year to year. You can find a full list pdf of available entities for download on the US Census Bureau site.

Installation

Install using pip

pip install census-cb

Usage

# Create a Boundary File for the desired entity
bf = BoundaryFile(2020, 'us', 'state', '500k')

# Create a processor for downloading and unpacking the data; this processor will return a GeoDataFrame
cbfp = CBFProcessor('gdf')

# Downloads and extracts the Boundary File.
cbfp.process_data(bf)

Examples

Download and display the state boudnaries from the US Census Bureau.

# Create a Boundary File for the US State Lines
state_boundary_file = BoundaryFile(2020, 'us', 'state', '500k')

# Create a processor that returns a GeoDataFrame
cbfp = CBFProcessor('gdf')

# Get the Data
state_lines = cbfp.process_data(state_boundary_file)

# See the Data
state_lines.plot()
state_lines.head()

To Do

• provide some better functionality for editing Entity Information after a BoundaryFile object is declared.