Relative "curvy-ness"

[aburton07]

I work in the rail industry and part of my work involves comparing routing options. I have a number of metrics that I use but one that I would like to incorporate is the relative "curvy-ness" of one route vs another. does anybody have any insight on metrics or tools that I could look at to derive something like this?

[DanPatterson]

start-end straight line distance vs along route distance

[Eugene_Adkins]

I don't have any experience trying to accomplish the goal you're looking for, but I found a ESRI python tool made for finding the "sinuosity" for rivers (I'm not certain about its compatibility with Pro), though I can't help but wonder if it would not work for any line: Calculate Sinuosity - Overview

Here is community thread on the subject. It's several years old though.

Maybe the "Traverse" tool will help? Here's an ESRI based YouTube instructional video.

This "Simplify By Straight Lines And Circular Arcs" tool is supposed to be Pro compatible but I'm not sure of its usefulness to you.

Sorry to be offering so much "advice" without any certainty ... but I hope something helps if no one else has suggestions.

[DavidPike]

Yes I did think the same was a simple effective solution, but a route could be indirect but still not very 'curvy'.  After a google, it did lead to an interesting tool which is the logical continuation of your idea Dan, which is to measure the sinuosity - but then do this with much smaller line segments (you'd need to split the polylines up prior of course).

Comparing the means of the 2 route's sinuosity indices would give an indication of relative 'curvyness' I guess 🙂

https://www.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=00e708a448b74810a0e805c4a97f9d46

all really from this thread and linked threads:

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/195370/determining-curvature-of-polylines

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/37058/algorithm-to-find-out-points-of-inflection-for-a-polyl...

[aburton07]

Thanks for the excellent feedback! I have looked into sinuosity in the past, but it seemed like it was more of a measure of route circuity than a measure of the 'curvy-ness' of the route itself.  I really like the idea of breaking up the segment into a lot of much smaller fixed length segments and using this to generate a mean route sinuosity. Now to figure out how to make it happen.... 

[DanPatterson]

Divide a polyline by a value—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation if you have just a few routes to analyse

or the pair of

Generate Points Along Lines (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation

Split Line at Point (Data Management)—ArcGIS Pro | Documentation