Hello People, I have incident point data and roads (line) data, how do i calculate distance from incident points to roads and see if roads influence incidences? Thanks, Dan

[danielmacharia]

My analyses involves 2 datasets, i.e., incident data (points) and roads data (lines). I want to explore if roads have an influence on the incidences. Kindly advice on how to go about it. I'm using ArcGIS 10.2 (Basic/ArcView) with access to Spatial Analyst Extension and 3D Analyst Extension only. Thanks,

[DanPatterson_Retired]

My first question would be...what type of incidents?  road accidents? then the answer would be yes.
For other incidents you could examine the Near tool to get distances from events to the lines then examine the line distances descriptively or by road type etc.  With the Spatial Analyst, you could also use a euclidean distance from your roads to generate distances from them then extractValuesToPoints to pull out the distance values derived previously on a point by point basis.

Of course the underlying assumption is that the incident is able to occur anywhere within the euclidean space bounding the roads (ie no impediments or movement costs etc) and that the location of the incident is purelyor primarily controlled by distance from the road

[DanPatterson_Retired]

closed?

[DarrenWiens2]

As Dan says, Near is the default answer for Advanced licensing, and the lesser-considered Spatial Join (using CLOSEST relationship and specifying a distance field) will yield the distance from point to closest line for all license levels.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Let's not forget that the most important thing is addressing the assumptions I pointed out.  The tools will only be useful should the conditions apply, particularly those in my last paragraph