I wondered why they would create so many unnecessary blocks.
I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1]
"An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2]
Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
I had interpreted a "census block" to be an arbitrary unit, but it seems to have originally designated actual city blocks. In 1990 they decided to divide the whole country into blocks. [1]
"An automated computer process looks for all visible and nonvisible features in our geographic database (MAF/TIGER) that should be a block boundary and creates a block each time those features create a polygon." [2]
Kind of an interesting extension of the "block" concept. It would seem that population density should be more of a factor. Automatically generating 5 million unpopulated census divisions seems a bit like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Census_block
[2] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2011/...