Finding polygons within a certain distance from a point along a line

Question

Hello, I am a student working on a site suitability analysis and I need to figure out which polygons within my dataset are within a certain distance from bus stops. I have all of the bus stops as points in a data layer, and I also have a roads data layer downloaded as a line data layer. I want to see which polygons are within a 780 meter distance from bus stops, but I want to calculate this distance based on roads rather than "as the crow flies". I believe I will need to use a proximity analysis tool, but am unsure which once would be best for this analysis. Thank you!

DanPatterson · Answer

If you loosen your criteria for a bit, you could

do a select by location all those polygons that are within a distance of 0 m to the roads (that is, they are adjacent to the roads)

buffer your bus stops by some distance, dissolving the buffers,

intersect the dissolved buffer layer with the polygon layer you created in the first step.

That will give you all the polygons that are within the distance of a bus stop. and adjacent to the road.

I am not sure why 779 vs 781 would make a big difference in an analysis

NinaOberg · Answer

I do have this extension yes. I've looked at information regarding some of the different tools that this provides, but I'm not quite sure which one would be useful for what I'm trying to do. It seems like in the tutorials that they list, these analyses are only choosing one locations which is deemed best based on the criteria. However, I want to include all locations that fit my search criteria.

Essentially, I have a polygon layer representing potential community garden sites, but I want to create a layer which represents gardens that would be within a 780 meter walk along the road to a bus stop. But I want to include all polygons which are within this buffer, not just those that are closest to each bus stop. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting the instructions for some of these tools.

DanPatterson · Answer

Do you have the network analyst extension?

Network Analyst tutorials—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation