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Distance to nearest road in the conterminous United States

April 22, 2005

The USGS Geographic Analysis and Monitoring (GAM) program has developed a national, high resolution dataset that gives the distance to the nearest road every 30 meters across the conterminous 48 states.  This work provides the first unified national picture of roadless space, vehicular accessibility, and intensity of road construction.  

The new dataset is the first member of the National Overview Road Metrics (NORM) family of road related indicators.  This indicator measures straight-line or Euclidean distance (ED) to the nearest road, and is given the compound name NORM ED.  NORM ED data can be viewed and downloaded from the transportation section of the web viewer for The National Map, http://nationalmap.usgs.gov.  The full-resolution dataset for the conterminous states is made of 8.7 billion values.

Publication Year 2005
Title Distance to nearest road in the conterminous United States
DOI 10.3133/fs20053011
Authors Raymond D. Watts
Publication Type Report
Publication Subtype USGS Numbered Series
Series Title Fact Sheet
Series Number 2005-3011
Index ID fs20053011
Record Source USGS Publications Warehouse