State Plane Coordinate System State Plane Coordinate System The State Plane Coordinate System (SPS or SPCS) is a set of 124 geographic zones or coordinate systems designed for specific regions of the United States. Each state contains one or more state plane zones, the boundaries of which usually follow county lines. There are 110 zones in the contiguous US, with 10 more in Alaska, 5 in Hawaii, and one for Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands. The system is widely used for geographic data by state and local governments. Its popularity is due to at least two factors. First, it uses a simple Cartesian
State Plane Coordinate System Surveyor Magazine", January 2004 link). It has been revised several times since then. When computers began to be used for mapping and GIS, the state plane system's cartesian grid system and simplified calculations made spatial processing faster and spatial data easier to work with. Even though computer processing power has improved radically since the early days of GIS, the size of spatial datasets and the complexity of geoprocessing tasks being demanded of computers have also increased. Thus the state plane coordinate system is still useful. Originally, the state plane coordinate systems were based on the North American Datum of 1927