A dataset of inter-county distances along the real-world highway and railway networks in the contiguous United States

Abstract

This dataset provides transportation mode-specific inter-county shortest-path distances along the real-world highway and railway networks in the contiguous United States. The dataset was generated using a QGIS–RStudio crosswalk that integrates geographic information system processing with network-based analysis to transform transportation infrastructure shapefiles into spatial networks and compute shortest-path distances between counties.The released dataset contains 15,213,970 origin–destination records across the two transportation modes. Among the 3,109 counties in the study area, 2,863 counties have an available representative network node on the highway network and 2,649 counties have an available representative network node on the railway network. Accordingly, the dataset contains 8,196,769 highway records and 7,017,201 railway records. For each transportation mode, the dataset contains all ordered origin–destination combinations among counties with available representative network nodes, including same-county records. Because the highway and railway network graphs are undirected, the reported inter-county distances are symmetric, although both origin–destination directions are retained as separate records.In the construction procedure, the adjusted geometric centroid of each county is used as the spatial reference for representative-node selection. Only network nodes assigned to the same county GEOID and belonging to the largest connected component of the corresponding transportation network are retained as qualifying network nodes. The qualifying node nearest to the adjusted geometric centroid is selected as the representative network node for that county. The adjusted geometric centroid itself is not used directly as an origin or destination in the shortest-path calculation. Instead, inter-county shortest-path distances are computed between the selected representative network nodes using edge-length weights along the corresponding real-world highway or railway network.Each record contains the origin county GEOID (ori_geoid), origin county and state name (ori_name), origin adjusted geometric centroid latitude and longitude (ori_centroid_lat, ori_centroid_lon), origin mode-specific representative network-node latitude and longitude (ori_node_lat, ori_node_lon), destination county GEOID (des_geoid), destination county and state name (des_name), destination adjusted geometric centroid latitude and longitude (des_centroid_lat, des_centroid_lon), destination mode-specific representative network-node latitude and longitude (des_node_lat, des_node_lon), transportation mode (mode), and inter-county shortest-path distance in miles (distance). All latitude and longitude coordinates are reported in WGS 84 (EPSG:4326).The highway network is constructed from highway features classified as Classes 1–2–3, corresponding to freeways, primary highways, and secondary highways or municipal arterials, respectively. The railway network is constructed from railway features categorized as M, I, or O, corresponding to the main sub-network, major industrial leads, and other tracks (minor industrial leads), respectively. The transportation infrastructure data are obtained from datasets maintained by the U.S. Department of Transportation Bureau of Transportation Statistics.The dataset can support applications in transportation planning, infrastructure investment, freight transportation, and supply chain and logistics analysis. The accompanying reproducibility code is available separately as a Figshare Software item at DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.33936526.