Final Project Proposal

Geography 310: Final Project Proposal
By Chris Mackey

The map subject I have chosen for my final project will be a map of the average price of regular unleaded gasoline in Virginia, per county. I chose this topic because of how topical this issue is to the average driver. With winter getting closer gas prices are sure to go up and I thought a map of what we pay for unleaded gasoline would be interesting. Whenever I drive down to my Grandparents house in Fredericksburg, I always make sure to get gas before I leave to go back to Fairfax since gas is much cheaper. The last time I went down to Fredericksburg, I paid $2.49 a gallon for regular while the price was at $2.99 up in Fairfax.
The audience for this map would be the commuters in Virginia. With gas prices rising above $2.50 last year and another increase coming up in the winter, Americans have begun to gripe over the escalating prices. With the traffic congestion every morning in the Northern Virginia Area, Virginia Beach, and Richmond, people are looking everywhere to find cheaper prices to pay at the pump. This map could show an interesting trend for counties outside the border counties to major cities in Virginia.
The type of map I am envisioning for this project is a color scaled map showing the average price for unleaded regular gas per county in the State of Virginia. The color scale would show how the counties average price compares to the states average price for unleaded gas. The scope of the map would be the state of Virginia since many commuters travel through this state to reach other destinations such as Washington D.C., Virginia Beach, Memphis, etc.
The main data set I will be using will be from a website called, Motortrend.com, the site is updated everyday and is accurate. I wrote down a few of the gas prices in Fairfax County and visually checked each one and concluded its’ accuracy. The site lists the Counties for the state, and when you click on them, it will list the city districts within that county. Each city district has a list of gas stations in that district. The site has a disclaimer stating that their data comes from OPIS (Oil Price Information Service) which is a site devoted fuel economy. OPIS gets its data by using credit card transactions as its primary source of information. There is another site which offer similar information such as internetautoguide.com which offers a setup somewhat like Motortrend.com but does not offer a disclaimer as to how it gets its information.
The basemap I will need for this project would be a map of the Counties in the State of Virginia. The first step I will take for this project will be to accumulate the data of the highest and lowest prices for unleaded gas fro each city in each county for the State of Virginia. The next step would be to calculate the average price of gasoline for each county and then the average price for the State. The next step would be to input the average prices into each county polygon on the basemap. The next step will be to create a Legend with a four class color scale. The final step will be to edit the map so it can visually be understood and easy to read. In total the project should take me about 2-3 weeks to complete.There are going to be a few challenges in the production for this map and they are all in the data collecting step. I will have to collect the data on the same day or else the prices may change and the final map will be less accurate. Another problem will be collecting the highest and lowest prices for each city. There are 130 counties in Virginia and some counties can have more than 10 cities per county so it will take a while to collect all the data. The next challenge will be to calculate the average prices per county. This isn’t challenging but just a long process. After getting past all these hurdles I don’t fore see a problem with the other steps.