topic Re: Calculating Road Area in Transportation Questions

Calculating Road Area

JamesUnderberg — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 18:43:28 GMT

Hey there, I'm working on a report on the landscape consequences of widening a river in Louisiana, and need to be able to calculate the area of roads that lie within the buffer I created. So basically, I'm looking for a dataset that has roads as polygons, not as polylines. Anybody have ideas on where I can find this? Or if you can think of another way to calculate the road area, I'm all ears! Thanks very much.

Re: Calculating Road Area

ChristopherBlinn1 — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:54:45 GMT

Hi James,

If you just obtain the width of the road, you could create a field, populate it with width data, then multiply the width and shape_length to get area. Unfortunately width is not constant for road types, but all average 12'/lane. Perhaps contacting your state DOT can give you some more accurate numbers.

Good luck!
-Chris

Re: Calculating Road Area

TimothyTresohlavy — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 13:38:58 GMT

I agree, the best approximation would come from a DOT or local government street centerline file that includes number of lanes.

If the area is not too large then you could rough-digitize over an aerial image, such as ESRI's basemaps: http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=10df2279f9684e4a9f6a7f08febac2a9 or http://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=677cd0c509d842a98360c46186a2768e

Street polygon files just don't exist outside of specific project locations where they were digitized for a single purpose or product.