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...
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.
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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