TIGER/Line Shapefiles

Using TIGER/Line data with VDA Desktop GIS

TIGER/Line shapefiles are extracts from the Census Bureau MAF/TIGER database, containing features such as roads, railroads, rivers, as well as legal and statistical geographic areas. TIGER refers to Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing. TIGER/Line shapefiles do not include demographic data.

Datum

Each shapefile contains a .prj file that contains the GIS industry standard well-known text (WKT) format to describe the coordinate system/projection/datum information for each shapefile. Census Bureau shapefiles are in Global Coordinate System North American Datum of 1983 (GCS NAD83). Each .prj file contains the following:

GEOGCS["GCS_North_American_1983",DATUM["D_North_American_1983",SPHEROID["GRS_1980",6378137,298.257222101]],PRIMEM["Greenwich",0],UNIT["Degree",0.017453292519943295]]

Detailed versus Generalized

Detailed: exact boundaries, all vertices, larger file sizes

Generalized: smoothed boundaries and do not represent the exact boundaries

Recent Vintages

2010 Census TIGER/Line Shapefiles with Urban Area Geography released March 26, 2012

 new urban area, census block, and faces shapefiles

2011 TIGER/Line Shapefiles -- released December 12, 2011

2010 TIGER/Line Shapefiles -- released on a rolling basis starting November 2010

2009 TIGER/Line Shapefiles -- released October 1, 2009

Using

Downloading TIGER/Line Shapefiles
Opening TIGER/Line Shapefiles into ArcGIS
Using Downloaded Data from American FactFinder with TIGER/Line Shapefiles
Joining Data to TIGER/Line Shapefiles
Creating a Thematic Map