Finding Contiguous Counties?

Question

I was given a list of over 200 US Counties ("home counties") that I need to produce a list of contiguous counties to each "home county."

Any suggestions how to produce such a list?

SepheFox · Answer

Hi Matthew, another option is to use the Get Adjacent Polygons from the ET Geowizards add-in (ET GeoWizards UserGuide ). The free version limits the number of features you can process at once, but you could always do them in batches, There are a ton of other useful functions of this add-in, so it's worth getting regardless.

curtvprice · Answer

I suggest trying the Polygon To Line tool and using the LEFT_FID and RIGHT_FID fields to find your neighborhoods, for example, for the county with FID = 23, you can get a list of neighbors by listing all lines that have LEFT_FID and RIGHT_FID value of 23.

DarrenWiens2 · Answer

The main tool you're looking for is Select Layer By Location, where overlap_type = (ideally) BOUNDARY_TOUCHES or (more realistically) WITHIN_A_DISTANCE (search_distance = 1m or so).

You can cycle through individual geometries using a Search or Update Cursor.