How Create Trade Area From Subgeography Layer (Business Analyst) works

The Create Trade Area From Subgeography Layer tool generates trade areas based on an intersection of a polygon-based boundary layer. The Output Feature Class is based on a polygon-to-polygon selection and computes a geometric intersection of the features in both polygon-based feature classes. A boundary layer is used to define which features of the subgeography layer will be included in the output feature class. These geographies can be Esri standard demographic layers or any user-generated polygon. Once selected, they will be exported as a new feature class with only the selected geographies.

You can create trade areas on subgeographic units that are contained within a larger geographic area.

For example:

• Create an output feature class that includes all the ZIP Codes that intersect a drive time trade area.
• Create a trade area of all the counties within a given state. In most cases, the correspondence between a parent and child geography is a strict hierarchical one-to-many relationship.

This tool can also handle many-to-many relationships by assigning the geographic features based on which features are intersected, for example, for a single ZIP Code, by two or many different trade areas.