Measure distance of "part" of a polygon

[EvanMacDonald1]

Hi all,

I'm wondering if it is possible to measure the length of one side/part of a polygon. What I have is a coastal property layer (a shapefile with many polygons combined, each with their own attribute information). I want to know the length of coastline for each property, and need to know the best way to go about this.

I have attached an image here showing the property layer. I need to know how to measure the distance of the southern boundary (which borders water) for each individual property. This is just a sample, there are about 15,000 properties in total.

Thank you!

[ZackK · Accepted solution]

If you have the water polygon touching the edge of your parcel layer...  Use "Intersect" command, and set the output to line...  Then calculate the length of individual segments (I use XTools calculate geometry).  The resulting line layer will have the lengths of the individual boundary sections.  

If not, just create a water polygon and run the above...

I hope that helps.

[EvanMacDonald1]

Thank you Zack, that worked perfect. I just used the "Calculate Geometry" function in ArcGIS

Evan

[ZackK]

Glad to be able to help, once in awhile:)

Cheers!

[JamesSerendip1]

Thank you for this solution!  I had the exact same issue and was able to use this effectively, but I wanted to add a side note here in case anyone else is as lacking in their powers of observation as I was at first...  my first several attempts at this solution kept yielding an empty line feature class, which I couldn't understand since there was so much clearly visible shared boundary in my Shoreline Land Parcel polygon data and my Waterbody polygon data...  Turns out it looked that way because I had the Land Parcels higher in the drawing order... the waterbody data was from a different source and didn't line up with the shore from the land parcel data, so without common boundaries I got no result.  In my case I was able to use the ERASE tool to remove the parts of the waterbody polygon that extended into the area of my land parcel polygons (since that is my more important/accurate data) and THEN run intersect w/line output on the resulting waterbody_erase feature class and my land parcels and all good!