How to measure travel time from one point to another taking into account road network?

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01-24-2016 07:57 AM
mariaalonso
New Contributor

Can someone indicates me how can I measure travel time from one location to another taking into account the road network? I woulad like to analyse travel times between 78 cities ( so I would have 78*78 measures). I think that I could use OD matrix but I am not sure!  and I do not understand how to calculate it

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4 Replies
WesMiller
Regular Contributor III

Do you have a Network Analyst license? You may want to move your question to Network Analyst

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mariaalonso
New Contributor

Thank you, I have a licence, I will move it

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ChrisDonohue__GISP
MVP Alum

This can be done with the Network Analyst Extension using either an OD Cost Matrix or Closest Facility:

In trying to decide between the two, ESRI offers this:

Tip:

The closest facility and OD cost matrix solvers perform very similar analyses; the main difference, however, is in the output and the computation speed. OD cost matrix generates results more quickly but cannot return the true shapes of routes or their driving directions. It is designed to quickly solve large M x N problems and, as a result, does not internally contain the information required to generate route shapes and driving directions. Alternatively, the closest facility solver returns routes and directions but performs the analysis more slowly than the OD cost matrix solver. If you need driving directions or true shapes of routes, use the closest facility solver; otherwise, use the OD cost matrix solver to reduce the computation time.

ArcGIS Desktop

OD cost matrix result that was set to find the four closest destinations

Important Note on the example image, which can be confusing - the lines depicted in this image do not show the actual path calculated on the road network, but instead depict the directly connected locations for simplicity.  The analysis does use the road network.

Source:  ArcGIS Desktop

Here's some resources to help get started:

ArcGIS Desktop - Network Analyst Workflow

http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/pdf/network-analyst-tutorial.pdf

General advice - realize that you may have to spend quite a bit of time acquiring and cleaning up the data before you can actually run the analysis.  There are lots of streetline datasets out there, but most are not topologically correct to the extent that Network Analyst requires.  It just takes one small gap between two lines which should be connected to throw an analysis.  Oftentimes these gaps are very small, to the point where you can barely see them when zoomed way in.  So a dataset which everyone else will look at and say is totally fine, as visually  at a normal viewing scale it looks great - could be actually be riddled with gaps.

Chris Donohue, GISP

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RebeccaStrauch__GISP
MVP Emeritus

tagging Network Analyst   for duplicate post How to measure travel time from one point to another taking into account road network?   (no responses in duplicate)

...sorry, just noticed is was suggested to move it...Maria look at Moving Content

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