Create a Drive Time Layer with a road that doesn't exist

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06-12-2019 04:02 PM
MikeBinder
New Contributor II

Hi GeoNet Community, 

Bit of a noob to ArcGIS (use the online tool primarily) and the community here, so apologies if the format of this question doesn't meet guidelines. 

What I'm trying to do is create a drive time layer, with a road that doesn't exist (yet). Is this possible in ArcGIS Online or Desktop? Using that new road along with real roads, create a drive time layer. Are users able to create imaginary streets / roads / highways - to be used in the drive time analysis tool? 

 

drive-time‌ esri roads and higwhays‌ 

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6 Replies
RyanKoschatzky
Occasional Contributor III

I don't see anything from a Roads and Highways prospective that would prevent you from incorporating active future routes in your data model, it would just require some careful analysis of your existing data model. For NC we have Projected Routes, which would act in the same manner your proposing. However we only do that for the project main line, typically a future Interstate or US route and not your smaller (state highways, county roads, etc ) routes or the whole construction project.

Thinking out loud do you want to make it part of your route ids or is active routes an event. What limits do you have on your existing route id structure? If an event, how easily can you export the LRS and one or more events, do the analysis outside of R&H? As an event, how would your other business units know what is a real or imaginary route and would that concept be to difficult to follow in a normal editing workflow? What is the level of maintenance of the LRS, do you only have a few folks or a small dataset to maintain the LRS, so this type of work effort to change routes from imaginary to real may be a resource issue not a software issue. 

Additional, nothing would really stop you from exporting your database and editing the linework outside of R&H for the imagery routes. That would be more of a manually effort but depending on your environment it might be the best option. 

Hope this helps.

MikeBinder
New Contributor II

This would be for a county road specifically. The application is if a Fire Station is in a certain location, an existing county road would be connected connected (there's currently a 1-mile gap where it's not). So the question is what is the impact on drive time if that county road is connected?

I've only used the online tool's Drive Time Analysis feature at this point, so I'm not well versed in the LRS capability... noob level..Data Analyst trying to learn GIS.  

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ErinLesh1
New Contributor III

I'm guessing you are not using the Roads & Highways extension.  If you use the ArcGIS Desktop Network Analyst extension, you can run the analysis using your own centerline data and create a line for the road that doesn't yet exist in the real world.  You would need to create a network dataset from your road data though.  If you use the ArcGIS Online network analysis services, I think you're limited to doing the analysis using street data provided to you so it would not contain the road you want to include (https://doc.arcgis.com/en/arcgis-online/reference/network-coverage.htm).    

MikeBinder
New Contributor II

No, I'm not using the Roads & Highways extension. The only method I've used is the Drive Time Analysis feature in the online tool. I will explore the Network Analyst extension which my license doesn't currently have, but it looks like I can trial it.

Thanks, 

Mike 

I think you can do it in Desktop with the Network Analyst extension and any network analysis capable dataset.  Esri provides a "Maps and Data" resource that includes a roads dataset as a baseline, you'd have to get that into an editable database then copy a road and give it the properties you desire for the network extension to figure out the drive time.

I doubt if there is easy way to do it through online drive time analysis tools... you might be able to if you could configure your own network dataset for the tool like you can for geocoding... but you seem to be talking about one road. The online tools are convenient and I like to compare drive time analysis polygons generated by different software, I've found some methods produce better results than others for different purposes, and what is best for my particular case can vary a lot in different locations or case by case.  

Basically, distance traveled is a simple function of length and speed, if you can plot a line and guess an average speed, you can calculate distance traveled along that line for any given time. You could use linear referencing to model a route with the units of length as measures, and create a point event or line event starting at the origin measure, and calculate and plot the traveled distance as an event by making the point or end measure equal to the travel time T (60 minutes=1hour) * Vaveragetravelspeed (miles/hour).  You could complicate it further by making events of average travel speeds per section then summing the sections.

Kyle

MikeBinder
New Contributor II

Looks like my license doesn't currently have the Network Analyst extension, but I will look into trialing it. 

What other software do you use to compare drive times? 

Worse, case I could probably do an estimation with the formula since it's only a ~1-mile stretch of county road. 

Thanks,

Mike

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