Connecting House Points to City Street Network

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07-02-2014 07:54 AM
JoshuaNewman
New Contributor
Im currently trying to set up a network that includes points representing properties (houses), polylines representing roads/streets, and polylines representing rail stations. The problem is that a significant amount of the 300,000 properties aren't connected to the road network. Im looking for a way to add connecting lines where necessary from properties to streets and set an attribute on these drawn connections to approximate walking time.

Is there a way to do this leaving the original road network unaffected? The snapping tools I have tried seem to distort the road network significantly since some of the properties are over 100 meters from a road. These tools also seem to just extend roads, so I can't set a attribute for travel time on these extensions.

Any help, suggestions, resources would be greatly appreciated!
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MelindaMorang
Esri Regular Contributor
First, is there a compelling reason that the properties (houses) have to be included as feature in the network?  Will these houses simply be used as origins, destinations, stops, facilities, etc. in your analyses?  If so, you don't need to build them into the network.  When you load them as locations into your NA layers (Service Area, Route, etc.), the layer will automatically locate the points on the closest network edge.  You can adjust the location settings as needed.  The actual points don't need to be part of the network.

If you DO need all those properties to be junctions in the network, here's how you can do it (you need the at least the Standard (ArcEditor) license for this method):
1) Create a copy of your 300,000 houses that aren't attached to the network.
2) Use the Snap tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//001v00000007000000) on the copy of the houses to snap them to the closest street feature.
3) Use the Points to Line tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//00170000003s000000) to create a straight line between the original house location and the snapped house location.  Make sure to match up the points by ID so you get one line between each pair.
4) Include this line feature class in your network.  You can set up your impedance attribute to calculate the travel time based on the line length or whatever else you want.
5) You need to ensure that the street feature class has a vertex or endpoint at the location of the snapped house location or else the network won't connect in that location.  The easiest thing to do is to run the Integrate tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//00170000002s000000) to create a vertex on the streets in the location of the snapped houses.  This will create vertices in those locations.  Then, when setting up your network, make sure you include the snapped houses as junctions, and use Override as the connectivity policy for the snapped houses.

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MelindaMorang
Esri Regular Contributor
First, is there a compelling reason that the properties (houses) have to be included as feature in the network?  Will these houses simply be used as origins, destinations, stops, facilities, etc. in your analyses?  If so, you don't need to build them into the network.  When you load them as locations into your NA layers (Service Area, Route, etc.), the layer will automatically locate the points on the closest network edge.  You can adjust the location settings as needed.  The actual points don't need to be part of the network.

If you DO need all those properties to be junctions in the network, here's how you can do it (you need the at least the Standard (ArcEditor) license for this method):
1) Create a copy of your 300,000 houses that aren't attached to the network.
2) Use the Snap tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//001v00000007000000) on the copy of the houses to snap them to the closest street feature.
3) Use the Points to Line tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//00170000003s000000) to create a straight line between the original house location and the snapped house location.  Make sure to match up the points by ID so you get one line between each pair.
4) Include this line feature class in your network.  You can set up your impedance attribute to calculate the travel time based on the line length or whatever else you want.
5) You need to ensure that the street feature class has a vertex or endpoint at the location of the snapped house location or else the network won't connect in that location.  The easiest thing to do is to run the Integrate tool (http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//00170000002s000000) to create a vertex on the streets in the location of the snapped houses.  This will create vertices in those locations.  Then, when setting up your network, make sure you include the snapped houses as junctions, and use Override as the connectivity policy for the snapped houses.
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JoshuaNewman
New Contributor
Thank you so much for going into such detail on the procedure, really appreciate it!

-Josh
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