Thanks for the great map -- I love data crunching and this is fun to see.
But, responding to the comments on factoring in subjective weather, distance, etc... -- of course, if you are going to do that, then traffic needs to become a factor. For me, the most frustrating thing about living in Northern VA/DC-area isn't the lack of courses -- I've got half a dozen awesome courses within an hour drive, assuming no traffic. It's the fact that on a weekday with local traffic, it takes 30 minutes to get to the closest 9-hole course after work, and any of the good 18 hole courses are a complete impossibility, because it would take 2-3 hours to get there.
And even if I could get off work early and get to a good 18-hole course, it might take 2 hours to get home at dusk based on traffic, so one round of golf could end up costing me 6 hours of time. At that point, I might as well take up real golf -- several real golf courses much closer and easier to access than the disc golf, and less time consuming (though not as much fun).
Even on weekends, it can be awful. Heading out of the city on a Saturday morning or back into the city on a Sunday evening can be just as bad, because of the interstate bottlenecks around D.C. Courses 50-miles south can be a waste of time on a summer saturday if you try to leave after 8 a.m. because traffic can be so backed up.
Admittedly, the DC-metropolitan area will never be on that list of top 10 places to live and play disc golf -- land values are just too high to ever expect a density of A-list courses -- but I do think in a perfect (though unattainable) formula, traffic patterns for cities would factor in. Because it's not about DISTANCE from a course as much as it is TIME, and those two factors are not in a fixed relationship.
For those reasons, I would actually give preference to more rural areas that have great concentrations of disc golf, because the accessibility of courses becomes higher. I'd vote the Allentown area of PA pretty high on that list for a lot of reasons -- lots of courses, the courses are very different from one another, and the travel times are minimal and traffic is hardly an issue.
But, responding to the comments on factoring in subjective weather, distance, etc... -- of course, if you are going to do that, then traffic needs to become a factor. For me, the most frustrating thing about living in Northern VA/DC-area isn't the lack of courses -- I've got half a dozen awesome courses within an hour drive, assuming no traffic. It's the fact that on a weekday with local traffic, it takes 30 minutes to get to the closest 9-hole course after work, and any of the good 18 hole courses are a complete impossibility, because it would take 2-3 hours to get there.
And even if I could get off work early and get to a good 18-hole course, it might take 2 hours to get home at dusk based on traffic, so one round of golf could end up costing me 6 hours of time. At that point, I might as well take up real golf -- several real golf courses much closer and easier to access than the disc golf, and less time consuming (though not as much fun).
Even on weekends, it can be awful. Heading out of the city on a Saturday morning or back into the city on a Sunday evening can be just as bad, because of the interstate bottlenecks around D.C. Courses 50-miles south can be a waste of time on a summer saturday if you try to leave after 8 a.m. because traffic can be so backed up.
Admittedly, the DC-metropolitan area will never be on that list of top 10 places to live and play disc golf -- land values are just too high to ever expect a density of A-list courses -- but I do think in a perfect (though unattainable) formula, traffic patterns for cities would factor in. Because it's not about DISTANCE from a course as much as it is TIME, and those two factors are not in a fixed relationship.
For those reasons, I would actually give preference to more rural areas that have great concentrations of disc golf, because the accessibility of courses becomes higher. I'd vote the Allentown area of PA pretty high on that list for a lot of reasons -- lots of courses, the courses are very different from one another, and the travel times are minimal and traffic is hardly an issue.
