Good morning and happy Friday,
I have a fairly straight forward routing problem that I cannot seem to solve with the various Network Analyst tools available to me. We have categorized our street network according to the level of traffic stress one experiences while biking (colored lines in the image below). The goal of this analysis is to calculate the network distance between the top trip producing census blocks (green points in the image below) and top trip attracting census blocks (red point in the image below). This would be done twice, once for all levels of traffic stress and once for only minimal levels of traffic stress so a comparison can be made.
In order to "connect" the census block centroids to the network, I created connectors (the gray lines emanating from the points) and integrated them into our network. The number of connectors was based on how many network segment midpoints fell along the border of the census block. I have weighted these connectors with 0 cost which was a decision made by our research team. The problem I am having, is that the route algorithm obviously searches for the route that costs the least (black line below) causing the route to traverse multiple centroid connectors and avoiding the network all together. I have introduced turn restrictions (see the red lines adjacent to the origin of the trip below) that restricts movement through two connectors. This appears to work, but would mean I would have to build turn lines for each pair of connectors in my network!
Does anyone know of an alternative solution to this problem? If there was a way to tell Network Analyst to never pass through a centroid or to only traverse one connector for any given route solution. I cannot think of a way to do this. Any ideas? Thank you in advance.
Russ
