Finding Gaps in Light Pole data

[BenWilkerson89]

I am trying to solve a problem where I need to find gaps in our street light data. I need to have street lights at every other pole, at street intersections and at dead ends/culdesacs. I have a dataset of all poles (with and without lights), a dataset of poles with lights, and a dataset of street centerlines and intersections. Using the buffer tool, I was able to find all the interesections that do not have street lights within 50 feet of them. 

How would I go about solving the problem of street lights at every other pole? This includes situations where there are poles/streetlights across the street. 

[RobertKrisher]

You could use the generate near table tool to identify the street centerline closest to each pole, and by turning on the Location option it will include the location on the centerline. You can then create a point layer from the coordinates in your near table (remembering the ID of the line), and join in the information from your pole layer whether it has a streetlight or not. That should make it much easier to visually review the centerline data.

[BenWilkerson89]

Thank you Robert for the suggestion! I did as you suggested but it didn't generate a point on the centerline for every pole as I thought it would. It only generated them at random intervals. As I hope you can see from the attached images, there are more poles that adjacent to the centerlines but it's not grabbing those. Do I need to set a search radius? 

[RobertKrisher]

Switch the order of input/near parameters in your GP tool. You want the poles to each find their nearest road (then use the near_x and near_y), doing it the other way around means that each road will only find its nearest pole 🙂 Specifying a reasonable threshold is always a good idea.

One of the biggest limitations of this approach is going to be how streetlights are captured in intersections (which street do they get assigned to?), but this approach will work well for long running stretches of road.