topic Re: travel time and distance in ArcGIS Network Analyst Questions

travel time and distance

NitaHuff — Sun, 16 Mar 2014 18:04:23 GMT

Hi I have a set of points and I'd like to find the round trip travel time and distance from them to a destination point along a network dataset of roads and highways which tool within network analyst would be best. I was thinking shortest distance but then OD cost solver sounds like it might work as well...Thanks

Re: travel time and distance

JaySandhu — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 22:41:15 GMT

Both tools can give you travel time and distance between a set of locations. You can solve on travel time attribute and accumulate a distance attribute at the same time. However neither will give you "round trip". That is, the route solver will solve A to B. It will not solve for A to B back to A. To do that you will have to add the start point again as the last point.

OD returns back a matrix so if you have 3 points, it will return back 9 shortest path distances.
Say your points are A, B and C. You will get:

A to A
A to B
A to C

B to A
B to B
B to C

C to A
C to B
C to C

in this way, if you need the round trip distance from A to B back to A, you can get the two columns A to B and B to A and sum them up.

The choice between the route and OD solvers will depend on how your input data is structured.

Jay Sandhu

Re: travel time and distance

NitaHuff — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 21:37:25 GMT

So I used the OD cost matrix and got the time in minutes it takes to get from my origin points (several hundred) to a destination, is there are way to calculate how many miles were traveled either through a minute conversion or somehow within GIS?

Re: travel time and distance

JaySandhu — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 23:02:59 GMT

Dose your network dataset also have a length attribute in addition to the time one?
If yes, then you can bring up the OD layer properties and on the accumulation tab check the length attribute to accumulate.
Now when you solve it will solve on travel time and also accumulate the length and report it on the odlines table.

Jay Sandhu

Re: travel time and distance

NitaHuff — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 01:25:23 GMT

It's a national transportation/streets dataset. So there is a length component, I'm assuming this is the distance for one way correct?