How do I get a polyline from each unique origin to each unique destination?

Question

My project is to display the sections of roads that see the most vehicle use from highest use to lowest use.  I was thinking about a line density map that would show the heaviest traveled road sections.  I have a shapefile with starting locations and a shapefile with ending locations.  Each starting location has one ending location.  I have been playing with Network Analyst in ArcMap, but have not come up with a solution yet.  Has anyone dealt with this issue before?

Running ArcMap 10.5

Melinda Morang · Answer

If your goal is the find the most-used road segments, Dan's suggestion to the the OD Cost Matrix solver will not work.  OD Cost Matrix does not return the used road segments but rather only gives you the travel time or distance between the points.

Instead, you need to use the Network Analyst Route solver.  You need to set up your input Stops carefully so you can create one route between each start and end location.  You can do this using the Route Name field.  You need to map a unique identifier for each start-end location pair into the Route Name field.  This will cause the Route solver to generate one route per unique Route Name, rather than putting all the points into the same route, which isn't what you want.

Once you have solved the route, you can use the Copy Traversed Source Features tool to see which road segments were actually traversed, and then you'll probably have to do some further processing to figure out the number of times each segment was traversed.

DanPatterson_Retired · Answer

available in arcmap and pro with the network analyst

Make OD Cost Matrix Analysis Layer—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop

Tutorial: Generate Origin Destination Cost Matrix—ArcGIS Pro | ArcGIS Desktop