GISforThought

I have often heard that X percent of the population Scotland live within Y miles of Glasgow. With the X and the Y varying between claimant.

This is a pretty easy question to answer, using the 2011 Scottish Census population results and the Census Output Area Population Weighted Centroids. Then we get the extents of Glasgow City Council from OS Boundary Line.

The results are:

,Pop. Count:,%
Scotland, 5295403, 100
Glasgow, 593245, 11.2
25 km, 2002431, 37.8
50 km, 2839583, 53.6
50 miles, 3776701, 71.3
100 km, 4201860, 79.3
100 miles, 4483330, 84.7

Pretty interesting results, especially the within 50 miles query.

To see how these boundaries look on a map:

A few caveats:
We are using the population weighted centroids, which will produce some minor inaccuracies, but is a very good generalisation.
Also we are using euclidean buffers on the British National Grid plain, so these are not geodesic buffers. The difference will likely be small at these distances.

So we have seen from the previous comparing the raw polygon accuracy between Voronoi generated polygons and NRS generated postcode polygons: Results.

The physical results are interesting, and a visual examination can provide a useful overall comparison, but how does this actually impact me?

I have a CAG from GCC and I just want to attach a postcode to it. How different will my results be between a true postcode boundary dataset from the NRS, and a generated Voronoi dataset from the OS?

I’m glad you are still with me, it might be useful to explain how postcodes actually work in this context:

Lets take a postcode of G31 2XT how does it break down?
Area: G
District: G31
Sector: G31 2
Unit: G31 2XT

So then we can compare how an actual address dataset, like the Glasgow CAG, spatially joined to two postcode datasets compare:

Assuming the NRS dataset is correct (a good assumption) how accurate is a postcode based on an OS Code-Point Open generated Voronoi polygon based on Glasgow City Council residentially classified properties as of 16/11/2014:

Total number of properties:
245096     100%
Correct Area:
245096     100%
Correct District
243650     99.4%
Correct Sector
240956     98.3%
Correct Unit
174344     71.1%

We can see that up to a sector level a Voronoi polygon can produce an extremely accurate results. A visual comparison of how this plays out in Glasgow can be seen here, with the legend best read from the bottom: