Esri Complete Street Rule Discussion-Feedback?

[DavidWasserman]

Hi All,

My name is David Wasserman, the urban planner/programmer that wrote Complete_Street.cga that is featured in the Complete Street Example. I was hoping that if anyone had any comments on the rule or suggestions for changes/features/bug fixes I wanted to provide a forum for that on Geonet. So say what ever comes to your mind, but I would prefer constructive feedback. This could be a forum where everyone could provide input, discussion, and hopefully create a better rule. If you want to discuss transportation/parking/urban planning rules generally for CityEngine consider hitting this thread first.

I have attached some example renderings for those unfamiliar with the rule and its capabilities. In addition, there is now documentation for the rule available for download here. It is still pretty rough, so feedback is appreciated. In addition to the documentation, there is a new version of the rule posted about here, feedback would be appreciated.

In addition, this is also an ok forum if you are having problems with the rule. If you comment on here, I get buzzed. In the numbered section below I will recount a short summary of problems discussed in this thread.

Kind Regards,
David Wasserman

PS: If you  do anything with the rule or want to share a rendering you made (a nice one), feel free to share your images/experience.

Discovery 1: Webscene issues that were worked out pretty easily, small webscenes work typically better.

Discovery 2: Street rule is not compatible with CE 2013. Its Crosswalks Depend on 2014 UVSpace options, and there is not an ESRI.lib file for 2013. Rule is designed for and works best with the most recent version of CE (2014).
Discovery 3: For road segments to snap, you must make sure they are apart of the same layer. Merge layers if you have snapping problems.

Discovery 4: Short road segments are hard for the street rule to handle at times. A few work around with short segments include: Change crosswalks and stop types to none, making the CrosswalkBegin/End attributes a negative number, manipulating nodes to be longer, or deleting unnecessary nodes to create longer street segments (use simplify graph tool) (Thanks Steve).

Discovery 5: A discussion about curb extensions  and how to make them albeit an unorthodox way is both below and on this thread.

Discovery 6: Bridges have a minimum height requirement to generate (structure just does not make sense below a certain height). Also if you want Piers to appear regardless of Occlusion settings use On, Show All Piers. If it still does not work try: Making a new segment to test the rule one, restarting CE, or re-importing the road layer and starting again.

Discovery 7: When cropping or re-sizing your aerial for your CE project chances are you will need to georeference the image to your geography or another aerial. Georeferencing an aerial in ArcMAP will take on the ArcMAP scene projection but that is not enough. Be sure to use the "Project Raster" in the Toolbox and this will ensure proper scale and placement for your CE scene.

Discovery 8: Mapped Attributes: IF you map the streetWidth or sidewalk street parameters, and you want to adjust them after the fact you must change both the mapped object attribute AND the shape parameter. See responses below for details.

Discovery 9: Handles - Recent editions to the rule in 2017 have started to support handles for traffic lights and streetlights for more custom edits that were typically reserved for photoshop. If you have any suggestions for handles please add a comment. 

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Notice: 1: There is a 2015 Version of the Complete Street rule. There was a bug in the street rule that did not make it work in 2015, and in this version of the rule the bug is fixed. It should work in 2014 as well as 2015 versions of CE.

[Andy_Standley]

Just to end this thread, my road layer had become unresponsive for some reason. I imported the road layer again and the rule now generates piers as expected. Thanks David, regards Andy

[DavidWasserman]

I did not think of that immediately, but I have had it happen where the attributes got changed enough that something happened to the base shape. I had to do something similar. Glad it works now.

[DavidWasserman]

A note on "Empty Space"L
I got a question recently asking me what the grey texture at the side of the street was. The answer is it is empty space that is masquerading as drainage culverts.

When you design a street rule you have two options to deal with "rounding error". You either use a ~ to have the texture to fill in the gap, or you you find something else to do with unallocated space. I choose to allocate another texture to deal with this because I wanted the street width to be as exact as possible.

So your next question how easily debug to reduce the grey space? Well I got you covered there too. I put into the rule a Flag Empty Space command. It will flag all streets where the empty space is greater than 1/3 the current lane width. You can use this to change the design decisions for the streets lane widths etc, and on a large scale it works best when you have textures turned off. See image below.

Hope you Street Rule users find this post helpful.

Steve Rhyne‌

Kathryn Angleton‌

Thanks Andy.

David

[SteveRhyne]

Hi David. I have a new challenge. I have a new project using a copy of the same folder structure and content for the Complete Streets rule and I encountered a scale issue. The original GIS data was in State Plane NAD83 CA Zone II Feet. My aerial was clipped and georeferenced to the same projection. I thought it was a feet versus meter thing so I projected everything to meters. I get the same results. You will see in the image the 80 ft. roadway x-section and the street network set to 24.2 meters. When I imported the aerial I double checked the pixel dimensions and it's the same as dimensions as my ArcGIS scene. Any thoughts? Thanks.

[SteveRhyne]

So the problem is the image. I created a new scene and inserted the original aerial (UTM NAD83 Zone 10N meter) and the road is properly scaled. I tried georeferencing the clipped aerial into that projection and it still gives me the improper scale so I used the raster projection tool and WhaLa!!!...the road is properly scaled. So using the georeferencing tool is not enough to change your image projection/coordinates even though it takes on the current scene projection in your ArcMAP scene.

[DavidWasserman]

Steve, I want to make this a "Discovery" in my edits above. Can you condense what you the problem and answer into about 2 sentences?

David

[SteveRhyne]

Discovery: When cropping or re-sizing your aerial for your CE project chances are you will need to georeference the image to your geography or another aerial. Georeferencing an aerial in ArcMAP will take on the ArcMAP scene projection but that is not enough. Be sure to use the "Project Raster" in the Toolbox and this will ensure proper scale and placement for your CE scene.

[AlanKlys]

Hi David,

That is some stellar work and a wonderful gift to the community.  Especially for those of us that are not so comfortable with the code side of things = me.  Thanks a whole bunch for making this available and for the explanations !

PS:  I've just started playing around with it here and noticed that angled parking for us lefties is not quite correct. Appears to need a small angle correction.     

[DavidWasserman]

I wondered when the British Empire would come knocking at my door...

In the Population Attribute group you can adjust angled parking manually. It is a quick fix. I will take a look at this for the next update however. Thanks for the report.

David

[AlanKlys]

Ahhhh ... brilliant, thanks for pointing that out.  This is one heck of a rule !!!