FIND DISTANCES BETWEEN POWER POLES

[nimitz]

Hi all,

I have a Personal GEODB that contains Point FC (POLES), Line FC (OVERHEAD TRANSMISSION LINE). I'm trying to use the Point-Distance tool in Toolbox, but it's giving me funky results. I'm on 10.2.1 and Pro. 

Ideally I'd like to have a new column(or a new table if that won't work) that shows the distance between 2 power poles, ie. POLE205-POLE206 - 250'. Or something along those lines. 

When I run the tool, it's giving me 54,000 records, a lot more than I'd imagine for 854 transmission poles!

Many thanks,

[nimitz]

So, I have the INPUT_FID and NEAR_ID fields. However, if there are 5 INPUT_FID with the number 1, that is not going to be useful in doing a join to the original GEODB.

Would this be a good time to create a GEOMETRIC network with my TRANSMISSION LINE file?

[BlakeTerhune]

The Point Distance tool is doing exactly what it is supposed to. I think you're trying to make it do something it's not meant to. That's why I asked if you have some specific rules about how your poles are connected. Please describe the topological interaction between poles and transmission lines. In other words: how would a computer know that it needs to measure the distance to one pole but not another?

[nimitz]

Blake,

Topologically speaking, I have no rules for the TRANSMISSION LINE FC. I did a quick import from AutoCAD - so it's a safe bet I/we never set any topological rules at all. Having said that, the POLE FC has no rules either. 

I can refine the parameters a little bit more and run the tool again, but my suspicion is (and I think yours is), I'm going to have to "clean" up the TRANSMISSION LINE file (ie snap the line together for runs). Which I've been doing here and there for the past month, but I've dreaded.

Many thanks for the help.

[BlakeTerhune]

I didn't mean that you actually needed to have topology rules created, just describe to us how the two are supposed to exist. You probably only need to snap them if it would help some custom process to clean it up. The Point Distance tool won't care if there's a transmission line snapped to the pole.

[ChrisDonohue__GISP]

If the transmission towers are coincident with the lines and the lines are all connected without gaps (I know, probably too much to ask with CAD data sometimes), one workflow would be to split the transmission line by the tower points, add attribute fields to the split lines for start and end, then use a Join to add the tower information to the lines.  The result will be a line feature class attributed with the tower ID for each end of the line that you can then read the distances off of.

Here's a similar question that was posted on GeoNet recently.  The full process is described in detail at the end of the thread.

Distinguishing lines that connect different type of points 

You will also need this:

Split Line at Point—Data Management toolbox | ArcGIS for Desktop 

The one catch is that I don't know if ArcGIS Pro has all this. 

Chris Donohue, GISP