As part of a regionalism series, Plain Dealer reporter Martin Stolz decided to explore fire services. A central question was whether greater Cleveland had duplicative fire departments, equipment or stations. He quickly realized the fire stations element was a story best told visually. Cuyahoga, the county around Cleveland, has a total of 103 fire stations. Stolz wanted to see if the county really needed that many, or if perhaps consolidation might save taxpayers millions of dollars without affecting firefighting abilities.
The result was a map of the location of every fire station in Cuyahoga County with a one-mile radius around it. The Plain Dealer was making the switch from ESRI ArcView 3.3 to ArcView 8.3 and this was the first chance to do a major map with the new software. Stolz had created a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with every station in the county. On our first pass through geocoding, ArcView plotted all but 15 of the 103 stations.
That's when the hard part started. For several addresses, ArcView had the street name, but not an exact address, and we were able to force ArcView to geocode those addresses using a nearby address. We found one street that was not even in ArcView. It was barely more than an alley, yet it was the legal address of the fire station. We deliberately gave some stations the wrong address from the standpoint of the post office, but perfectly fine for ArcView.
In the case of SOM Center Road, the letters were officially separated by periods, as in 'S.O.M.,' but ArcView saw 'S.' as 'South.' Once we found the problem it was easy enough to fix. It was easy to draw the one-mile radius around each station using ArcView's buffer wizard and telling it we wanted a buffer of one mile. At first, ArcView made circles appear as ovals, which signaled that we needed to pick a better map projection.
After we selected a projection for northern Ohio the ovals turned into circles. We exported the map in the Adobe Illustrator format and our graphics staff was able to open it with Illustrator and change colors and reposition numbers and names as they wanted.