Calculating route between 2 points using road network

Question

Hi everyone,

One of our department that is responsible for Sales would like to have a way to calculate the distances between the property (forests) and the saw mills where it might be possible to deliver the harvested wood. They want the calculation to be done taking in consideration the roads so that they can see the distances. Based on the distance between a property and the mill, they will calculate the transport cost and choose what mill is better to sell to. In our case we have as data the location of the properties and the location of the mills.

How I can use ArcGIS Pro in order to generate a calculation for the distances using some road infrastructure? Is there any easy way to do that? We have a Standard license for Pro.

One of my colleague found an API from Bing, but you need to input the coordinates of the starting point and ending point, and it has a limitation of 5000 calculations. In our case, we have around 8000 polygons of properties and around 150 possible mills around the country where we can deliver. From each polygon they want to have a calculation to each mill.

Many thanks,

Claudia

ASw93 · Answer

You can measure straight line distance, but I think if once you need it to trace along a polyline road layer then it becomes network analysis which you'll need the license for, unfortunately.

ClaudiaBlagu2 · Answer

I thought about that, only issue that I have is that I do not have a road network done in the sense of the network analysis, so it would be extra work on that side. I was thinking if there is another way to calculate distances between 2 points using a polyline layer with roads.

Thanks

ASw93 · Answer

I think you'll need to get yourself a Network Analyst license. Then you can use the Route tool, and the other Network Analysis tools.

https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/latest/help/analysis/networks/route-tutorial.htm