Good afternoon!
I'm trying to align a feature class containing traffic jam polylines with our road network in an automated way. The traffic data provider uses a different road network than ours, hence the need to align them.
For the most part the Align Features geoprocessing tool works quite well, except that sometimes it gets confused where roads converge at small angles (for example where entrance/exit ramps meet the main roads/service roads) and at complex highway interchanges or roundabouts.
In troubleshooting this issue, it seems that the spatial index grid size might have some effect on the alignment results. Somewhat by accident, I noticed that if I take the same input geometries, and align them with the same target geometries (repeating the test using target feature classes with different spatial index grid sizes), one resulted in a correct alignment and the other did not. I repeated the test in ArcGIS Pro 3.1 and in ArcMap 10.8.2 and I get the same results.
Can anyone help me figure out how to achieve the best results from the Align Features tool? Would using a larger or smaller grid size help, or is it completely coincidental?
Or is there a better way to achieve what I'm trying to do?
Thank you!
Dan, did the new ArcGIS Pro package attachment (SampleRoadsAndTrafficJams.ppkx) that I posted today come through? That one has more batches of jams as well as the complete set of target roads.
Thanks,
David
Yes, I extracted the ppkx you shared. Here are the data I got:
Got it right this time. Thx!
Thanks Dan - btw, I'm sorry, the project only has one batch of jams (I thought there were more batches), but it should be plenty to give you the idea of the type of geometry we're getting for the traffic jams.
Hi David, I did some testing and would like to show you a few good / bad cases. Also I had to do some pre-processing before using Align Features. Would you like to email me at dlee@esri.com so I can explain more to you? Once you get a clear conclusion, you can sum here.
Dan, thank you very much for taking the time to run tests using our sample data and for meeting with me last week! I'll try to summarize everything I've learned so far from our conversation and my experiences:
Hopefully this summary is helpful to others that might be attempting to use Align Features in the same way.
Thank you again for your help!
-David