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Searching for a way to measure distance along a track

ColbyOlsen

I'm working on a project for hiking trail signs. I have a network of trails and I'm looking for the most efficient way to measure the distance between the junctions and landmarks along the trail. Is there a utility or function where I can pick a point along the trail and the distance along that track will be measured for me? Right now I'm having to manually tightline the track with the ruler function and it's very time consuming. I'm a level 2 AGOL user.

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Anonymous User

So, for clarity, this is what you're doing:

In AGOL, you have a map of hiking trails.

You want some process that will tell you the distance between various points along the trail (i.e. not as straight as the crow flies, but sticking to the path).

Do you have access to ArcGIS for Server? ArcGIS Desktop? ArcGIS Pro? Or just AGOL?

ColbyOlsen

That is precisely what I'm trying to do. I need to put a sign at each junction with distances to the next point.

At the moment I only have AGOL.

Anonymous User

I'll do a quick search to see if anyone has a public Geoprocessing Service that accomplish this.

XanderBakker

I don't think you will find a tool that you can in ArcGIS Online to generate the information you want to put on the signs. ArcGIS Online offers routing functionality, but it will use the network that ArcGIS Online routing is based on and that most likely won't match the data you have.

In Desktop you would be able to create a network and one could probably automate this using some Python and Network Analyst or applying some plain Dijkstra (https://community.esri.com/people/xander_bakker/blog/2014/12/24/finding-the-shortest-route-using-dijkstras-algorithm ). However, should the sign only contain the nearest place in a certain direction or also place further along the way?

Can you share a screenshot of your data and provide some information about how many signs you are planning to generate?

ColbyOlsen

I'm going to have 37 signs with about 50 directional labels. The labels will be significant points of interest or junctions, so sometimes they will be the next destination and sometimes they will be very far away.

I should mention I'm a very novice user of ArcGIS. I don't really need to get into routing or automatically generating distances to each point. All I really want to do is measure a segment of a track. I have a trail, and I want to manually select two points along that trail and find the distance between them, following the trail. I'm pretty sure I can't do this with the access and data that I have, but I thought it was worth.

I can provide a screenshot of the data/map, but I'm not quite sure what you're looking for.

Anonymous User

Colby,

These are probably the most useful for you: arcgis desktop - Finding distance of point along polyline? - Geographic Information Systems Stack Exchange

I've been looking around Montana's GP services: Folder: LRS ... one of those may fit the bill?

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