13.2 Case study: bike shops in Germany

Imagine you are starting a chain of bike shops in Germany.The stores should be placed in urban areas with as many potential customers as possible.Additionally, a hypothetical survey (invented for this chapter, not for commercial use!) suggests that single young males (aged 20 to 40) are most likely to buy your products: this is the target audience.You are in the lucky position to have sufficient capital to open a number of shops.But where should they be placed?Consulting companies (employing geomarketing analysts) would happily charge high rates to answer such questions.Luckily, we can do so ourselves with the help of open data and open source software.The following sections will demonstrate how the techniques learned during the first chapters of the book can be applied to undertake the following steps:

• Tidy the input data from the German census (Section 13.3).
• Convert the tabulated census data into raster objects (Section 13.4).
• Identify metropolitan areas with high population densities (Section 13.5).
• Download detailed geographic data (from OpenStreetMap, with osmdata) for these areas (Section 13.6).
• Create rasters for scoring the relative desirability of different locations using map algebra (Section 13.7).
  Although we have applied these steps to a specific case study, they could be generalized to many scenarios of store location or public service provision.