Census Cartographic Boundary Files, 2018 vintage

census.gov-boundaries-2018-1.2.8 Last Update: 2020-06-25T18:05:51

The cartographic boundary files are simplified representations of selected geographic areas from the Census Bureau’s MAF/TIGER geographic database. These boundary files are specifically designed for small scale thematic mapping.

This data package collects a selection of the US Census cartographic shape files, which are designed to be used in creating maps. For each type of region, they come in a varity of resolutions, so they are more suitable for creating web maps than the much larger TIGER files.

These files have been processed to all have the same schema and use ACS style Geoids. The original files have AFF style geoids, which have extra '00' characters in them.

The use of a single schema means that in some files, some columns are consistently empty. For instance, ZCTA ( which are similar to ZIP code regions) may not be entirely within a single state or county, so they don't have a well-defined state and county. In these cases, the state_fips stusab and county_fips columns will be empty.

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