topic Re: Calculate Walking Distance - Network Analyst in New to GIS Questions

Calculate Walking Distance - Network Analyst

DanielleLoring1 — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 12:41:10 GMT

I'm looking to find all streets within a .5 mile and 1 mile walking distance of schools. I'm completely drawing a blank on what the best way to do this with network analyst would be. If anyone could walk me through it, I would appreciate it!

Re: Calculate Walking Distance - Network Analyst

DanPatterson_Retired — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 14:10:51 GMT

Finding a service area ....

Service Area Analysis ...

And then there is the tutorial for network analyst basics

Network Analyst tutorial

You will need to do basic network creation stuff and I assume you have school locations.

Re: Calculate Walking Distance - Network Analyst

ChrisDonohue__GISP — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 15:23:16 GMT

As mentioned by Dan Patterson creating a Service Area is the way to go. One of the options when running the Solve for the Service Area is to Generate Lines, which once they are created can be exported as a feature class and then used as an aid in finding the specific streets.

The biggest challenge will be getting a good line dataset together, as while street datasets can be commonly found for most areas, many are CAD based or other wise loosely digitized so do not have connectivity between the street lines. All it takes is one very tiny gap to cause the analysis to miss a whole area. So expect to spend quite a bit of time doing cleanup of the street data before running the analysis. Running topology on the street dataset is highly recommended.

Ffor walkability, you may need to add in pedestrian paths to your street data. Also, you will need to account for any streets that do not have safe pedestrian walkways along them (so are not traversable).

Finally, one will need to take into account overpasses/underpasses in areas where one cannot transfer directly from one to another. This is typically handled by populating the Elevation field to have different values for the segment(s) above and the segment(s) below so they are treated as non-traversable when the network dataset is built.

Chris Donohue, GISP

"Network Analysis = 1% analysis + 99% data cleanup"

Re: Calculate Walking Distance - Network Analyst

ChrisDonohue__GISP — Fri, 08 Sep 2017 16:42:44 GMT

Here's a workflow for creating your network dataset:

Creating a network dataset—Help | ArcGIS for Desktop

Chris Donohue, GISP