SafeGraph is a free website to download census data with demographics. This website provides you open census data sets that you can analyze to see various population parameters in a specific region. All the data it gives you is from American Community Survey (2016). It basically gives you a ~8.5GB archive that you can download on your PC and analyze the data. Inside the archive, there are a lot of CSV and GeoJSON files that contain the geographic statistics along with the population data that you can analyze. Another use case of this huge data set is in AI. You can train your models on this data if you are familiar with the different AI concepts.
If you need free census datasets then you can easily get that via SafeGuard website. If you know how to view and use this data to understand to some really useful statistics about the distribution of population over a geographical area. In the dataset, you will see all the census block groups with the amount of land, water and the corresponding latitude and longitude. In addition to that, it even consist of IP statistics which helps to see total number of POI with IP addresses. The data is in spreadsheet format and you can easily use that.
Downloading Census Data with Demographics Free:
Getting the open census data from this websites is very simple. You can easily download the archive which is around 2GB in size in compressed mode. When you’ll extract it then it will occupy around 11GB of disk space. Inside the archive, you can see a lot of CSV files, holding information that you can use to calculate median income, median age, median rent, travel distance, top brands, etc.
To download the open census data, simply hit the download button given on the website. It will ask your email address to send the download link. After getting the link, you can start downloading it and you may consider download managers software for downloading the archive at fast speed and resume capability.
Now, when you have the data you can use any archiving software like 7-Zip to extract it and then start using it. There are three folders namely metadata, data, and geometry. You will find the demographic data and CBG pattern files with census attribute tables in them. All the files in the dataset have the census block group as the primary key.
If you know how to use this data to map and analyze different aspects then you are good to go. Otherwise, there is a demonstration of demographics & insights mapping from the data on the main website. See the screenshot below.
You can use all the data that this website gives for detailed study and research. There are some other websites that can provide you with the census data and you are free to compare that with it as well. But this website can give you the whole archive of the census data while other websites can only give you specific data set according to your query.
Final thoughts
If you want a complete census data set for your projects, research or just for the knowledge then use the one provided by SafeGraph. The huge datasets that it gives you are easy to analyze and map. If you don’t know how to deal with this data then there is a documentation about it as well which can be helpful.
