I would like to determine the width of sidewalks. I have polygons of the sidewalks. However the sidewalks vary in width at any given part of the block. I would like to determine the widths each time it changes. Actually, I think what I'd like is to split the sidewalk polygon at each change of width and create an attribute for each polygon for the width of that segment of sidewalk.
I used ArcScan Vectorization to create a centerline of the sidewalks. This process gives average width.
I'm not sure that there is going to be any easy way of automating this. That said what you trying to accomplish is to measure the distance between two vertices within your polygon that are 90 degrees from each other and there is no guarantee that you are going to have a vertex opposite each other for each location within your polygon. Unless someone has a brilliant answer to accomplish this you might have to do this by eye and create a tool using geoprocessing to interactive split and measure the distance upon splitting your polygons. Have a look at feature sets: http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//002w00000023000000
Perhaps you could densify the centrelines (say 1 m intervals), automatically create a perpendicular line at each new point, then clip the new lines with the sidewalk polygon layer.
I don't want to hijack this post, but how would I accomplish this. this is a problem I just ran accross. "densify the centrelines (say 12 ft intervals), automatically create a perpendicular line at each new point"
