Bus Routes and Network Analyst

AndrewSedor

Hey,

I am a summer planning student with the City of Calgary.

Coworkers and I have been assigned the task of doing a ???turn by turn??? routing for the buses in the city. This entails writing out what the turn by turn routes are for each bus, i.e. turn right at Centre Street, turn left onto 32 Avenue. Doing this manually takes quite a bit of time, seeing as there are around 300 bus routes that this needs to be done for.

I believe this problem could be solved by GIS network analyst... but I do not know exactly how. It would be great to have a report for all the routes listing each turn of each individual route. I have a ton of layers and data to work with.

I was wondering if anyone knows how to tackle this problem? I would be a hero at the office if I could figure this out.    


Thanks!

JaySandhu

You can use the Create Turn Feature Class from each of your routes. See this link:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?id=2069&pid=2068&topicname=Create_Turn_Feature_Class_(Network_Analyst)

That should help you get the turn by turn directions in a feature class.

You can also read up on the whole collection of tools here:
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?TopicName=An_overview_of_the_Turn_Feature_Class_toolset

Having turns in your network dataset does NOT help in turn by turn directions. Turns are needed to add restrictions or delays in the network.

Network Analyst will provide driving directions for a route that you solve. However you need to make sure the data for the streets and your bus routes (intermediate stops) needs to be available. I will suggest that you install the Network Analyst tutorial data and run through the tutorial exercises to get famillar with the routing/direction capabilities.

Jay Sandhu