GIS Application Feature - Location Analysis of Funerary Facilities

Because of traditional folk custom in Taiwan, more than half of populace thinks funerary facilities as the number one NIMBY facility. The NIMBY effects are reflected the most in facilities including funeral home, crematorium, memorial tower and cemetery. Firstly, these facilities mostly cause uncomfortable feeling; secondly, real estate near these facilities is influenced; lastly, these facilities might destroy environmental landscape, cause air pollution (such as crematorium), and make noise or other pollutions.

Pingtung City Government, Taiwan tried to negotiate with environmentalists and populace for moving crematorium and funeral home, but there are many ongoing debates that need to be solved still. Therefore, National Pingtung Senior High School planned to find out other proper locations for funerary facilities in a scientific and objective way through utilizing GIS analyses, and provides the relevant branches in government with the analysis result as plan references.

Goals

The existing funerary areas have caused problems like stagnant population growth and emigration, lower land price, less land trading, and air quality worsening. Hence, by utilizing GIS, Pingtung Senior High School planned to analyze and find out a better solution of location for crematorium and funeral home based on conceptions including “Feng Shui and Landscape”, “Environment Development and Environmental Protection”, “Development Period”, “Budget” and so forth.

Solutions

SuperGIS Desktop 3.1a Professional, SuperGIS Network Analyst and Address Locator are employed in this project. Through the software mentioned above, the relevant feature layers and satellite images of Pingtung county and city are overlapped and being processed with buffer analysis. Meanwhile, Google Earth is adopted to assist in interpreting the relevant topographic features, terrain and land utilization types in the research area. Also, through SuperGIS Network Analyses, the best location of establishing crematorium can be estimated, and what are the differences between ideal location and the proper location can be recognized. At last,“Address Locator” and “Network Analyst” in SuperGIS Desktop 3.1a to analyze the relationship between each land price and the relevant factors.

Containing more plentiful GIS tools, Desktop 3.1a provides GIS users form domains with a professional platform that is used to display, edit, manage, query and analyze spatial data and the related information more effectively and easily.

SuperGIS Network Analyst mainly allows users to perform network analysis for all kinds of applications, such as transportation planning, the shortest path to a scenic spot, pipe and cable installation allocation, convenience store location selection, and home delivery services. Suggestions of the most superior routes or the best locations can be obtained through the network analyst results.

Through overlapping of satellite images and feature layers, users are able to comprehend relative location of funerary greenfield site and adjacent locations.

Address Locator is an extension on SuperGIS Desktop. Through Address Locator, users can enter the required address to have the system conduct data comparison, and the searched address can be marked on the map directly.

Results

In this project, SuperGIS Desktop 3.1a is used to overlay feature layers including Boundary of Villages in South Taiwan, Traffic, Facility, POI Sites of Schools, and Urban Plan and so on. South Taiwan road map is also loaded onto SuperGIS Network Analyst and converted into road weights file for various analyses. True color satellite image with two-meter high resolution is utilized to work with Google Earth to interpret data. Besides, eight public cemeteries and two solid grounds published by Pingtung County Government are adopted as candidate location of funerary facility, and the system will induce the most proper location by buffering and analyzing overlapping layers. Please refer to picture 1 below.

Picture 1: Result of preliminary analysis of buffer and overlapping maps

Since the traffic accessibility of each location should be taken into consideration, “Network Analysis” is employed to discuss the distance between the crematorium and each densely inhabited district. This research employs “Location Analysis” in Network Analyst and sets conditions like using hierarchy specified to search provincial routes, arterial roads and straight direction first (please refer to picture 2). In north Pingtung, there are twenty-five towns. This project compared the maximum distance cost from each town to other twenty-four towns, and find out the minimum value from the maximum distance cost. The result found that center area of Neipu town meets our requirements. And the ninth public cemetery of Neipu town is the nearest location among the eleven selected locations to this center area, shown as in the picture 3.


Picture 2: Data built by SuperGIS Network Analyst	Picture 3: center point with the best traffic accessibility through Network Analysis
After comparing the six main factors, containing Protection Area of Water Source Field, Schools, Hospitals, Districts with Densely Residence, Watershed Area, Gas Station, Traffic Accessibility of Network Analysis, and considering various factors and prevailing winds, we founded that the best location in the research result is not the same as the one decided by the county government. Through GIS research, various limiting conditions, traffic accessibility of each countries and prevailing winds in Pingtung are analyzed with buffer and overlapping maps analysis in scientific and objective way. And we founded that the best location of crematorium and funeral home is not the same as the one that government decided. Therefore, the new location could be discussed and evaluated again by government according to this result