Creating First Due polygons

[MichaelRose]

I am currently working with our Fire Department and they would like to create "First Due" polygons.  These polygons would basically be the areas that a station can respond to faster than any other fire station within our city.  We have used drivability tools to predict the drive times from a given stations, but we are interested in taking this to the next stage, having the tool/model dissolve the polys to give a seamless polygon layer across our city based on our network.

Has anyone else done something like this?  If so, would you be able to point me in the right direction?

Appreciate the assistance!

[MarcinGasior]

Look at More Emergency Services Modeling article in ArcUser.
You may find some ideas there.

[PatrickStevens]

Hello!

I think you are looking at creating Service Areas using Network Analyst (Location-Allocation is a good option as well).  Here is a link to the Service Area doc:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//004700000048000000

and help with Network Analyst in general:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Types_of_network_analysis_layers/00470...

A good starting point is the Network Analyst tutorial:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/About_the_ArcGIS_Network_Analyst_tutor...

Service Area tutorial:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Exercise_5_Calculating_service_areas_a...

[PaulDoherty1]

Michael -

Here are my thoughts after consulting with some of our experts and some of their maps and information products.

1. Read the resource page for Make Closest Facility
2. Make sure you have a Network Dataset that is formatted for your analysis
3. Create "incidents" using either building centroids or block centroids using the Feature to Point geoprocess and use these for the Closest Facility Analysis.
4. Join the calculated routes back to the incidents. Calculated routes contain the target facilityID.  Join this to the incidents based on the incident id.
5. Visualize theoretical service areas using the Create Thiessen Polygons based on the facility / incident relationships and then symbolize your network by the service polygon they fall in.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15417[/ATTACH]
see the live map

Please let us know if you try this approach and how it works if you do. Of course, if anyone else has done this before please reply to the thread. Thanks for posting!

- Paul

[MichaelRose]

Hello!

I think you are looking at creating Service Areas using Network Analyst (Location-Allocation is a good option as well).  Here is a link to the Service Area doc:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//004700000048000000

and help with Network Analyst in general:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Types_of_network_analysis_layers/00470...

A good starting point is the Network Analyst tutorial:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/About_the_ArcGIS_Network_Analyst_tutor...

Service Area tutorial:

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/Exercise_5_Calculating_service_areas_a...

Thanks to both of you, but the Service Area did the trick.

[MichaelRose]

Michael -

Here are my thoughts after consulting with some of our experts and some of their maps and information products.

1. Read the resource page for Make Closest Facility
2. Make sure you have a Network Dataset that is formatted for your analysis
3. Create "incidents" using either building centroids or block centroids using the Feature to Point geoprocess and use these for the Closest Facility Analysis.
4. Join the calculated routes back to the incidents. Calculated routes contain the target facilityID.  Join this to the incidents based on the incident id.
5. Visualize theoretical service areas using the Create Thiessen Polygons based on the facility / incident relationships and then symbolize your network by the service polygon they fall in.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]15417[/ATTACH]
see the live map

Please let us know if you try this approach and how it works if you do. Of course, if anyone else has done this before please reply to the thread. Thanks for posting!

- Paul

Sorry Paul, I replied before seeing your post.  I will try this out as well.  Thanks for the tip!