Available Shapefiles

This page provides access to the various shapefiles that comprise the BERKELEY/PENN URBAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL MODELER’S DATAKIT.

Available shapefiles include: 
•    Municipal, county, metropolitan area, and state boundaries, as assembled from the US Census Bureau’s 1990 and 2000 TIGER data.
•    1990 and 2000 census block and census tract boundaries and selected attributes, including net housing and population densities.
•    Highway, railroad, and urban rail transit networks; and air and seaport locations as assembled from the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
•    Locations of major employment centers and employment data for 1994 and 2003.
•    Boundaries of all federal lands, including national parks and monuments, national forests, Bureau of Land Management lands, and military facilities.
•    Locations of all major water bodies including rivers, streams, lakes, and reservoirs.

Each shapefile is zipped (using WinZip 11) to save space.  Users may click on the .zip listing to download and access each shapefile. To see what a shapefile will look like when opened in ArcMap, click on the .pdf Preview Map listing for each shapefile. For more information on each shapefile, including the date of issuance, a list of attribute data values, projection details, and links to the original source data, click on the .html Metadata listing. 

All layers are projected to a Lambert’s Conformal Conic NAD83 projection system.  Once downloaded and unzipped, the data layers may be read directly into ArcMap, ArcView, ArcGIS, or any other GIS program that reads ESRI shapefiles. Although each layer is independently projected, to insure spatial consistency, users are advised to first download and add the basemap layer containing the outline of the 48 contiguous United States.

If you have problems downloading the data or find errors in the data, please notify John Landis at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it