Water and Waste Water Symbols

[TomasRiesco]

Im creating a water and wastewater Atlas in a 1" to 300' scale. Im having problems with the current symbols out of the box from ArcMap. For example, if I have a tee and 3 valves one on each water main it all looks like one big ball of symbols. Anyone has any advise on how to fix this issue??

Thanks

Tomas

[TomMagdaleno]

We do our maps at 200 scale and we set all the point features 10 feet apart.  So a tee with three valves would have all the valves 10' from the interesection.

[HowardCrothers]

Tomas,

Since the scenario you are describing is common for water utilities, we just wrote a blog about it:
http://blogs.esri.com/Dev/blogs/waterutilities/archive/2010/08/12/data.aspx

[JoshuaDamron]

We do our maps at 200 scale and we set all the point features 10 feet apart.  So a tee with three valves would have all the valves 10' from the interesection.

We have had issues with symbol placement with many features, most often with clusters of valves.  We find our selves weighing clarity in utility maps vs. accuracy for other engineering purposes.  We went with accuracy and instead rely on detail or blow up pages for our utility map books.  (We will be upgrading to ArcInfo next month, I am hoping to play with creating representations for all of our valves (Ugh!!)). 

Our standard Utility map book is 11x17 at 1:200, it is divided into a water section and storm/sewer section.  We offer our crews books both with or without the aerial photos and we use blow up pages for locations where the utilities are complex or confusing.  Blow up pages are 11x17 ranging from 1:25-40 scale depending.  Our City is not too big so I also created an additional 8.5x11 book with a blow up of every intersection in town to assist with locating valves (typically at 1:20 scale).

Looking at the image you attached I am very impressed with the clarity of your map labeling.  At first glance I thought is was a CAD drawing!  I like how the ID# tags are different colors for the different features (red= FH, blue = fittings, brown = blow offs, puke green = Air relief valve�??s).

Your labels are so well spaced and very clear, the arrows/ leaders are great!  I see from your table of contents that annotation layers were created go create such beautiful labeling.  We�??ve considered undertaking that huge task but there is the issue of updating & maintaining the annotation every time the attributes are updated, the overhead gets to be too much. 

Thanks for posting the pic and getting my gears thinking!

[JonCollins]

"We went with accuracy and instead rely on detail or blow up pages for our utility map books.  (We will be upgrading to ArcInfo next month, I am hoping to play with creating representations for all of our valves (Ugh!!)).  "

Josh, Do you know of some information to help me learn to do the blow-ups? I am in the exact boat you are and the blog quoted here was right on the money. As far as cartographic representations is INFO required for these? how well has that worked for you? Thanks, Jon

[TomMagdaleno]

We had Nobel Systems do our maps.  Their product is second to none.  For the blow-ups they created a second geodatabase for display of detail blow-ups that is not networked with the main lines.  Also, our legend is on the first page of the atlas, so it gives us more room on the individual pages.  Also, the parcels are colored according to the pressure zone.

[JimmyY]

We had Nobel Systems do our maps.  Their product is second to none.  For the blow-ups they created a second geodatabase for display of detail blow-ups that is not networked with the main lines.  Also, our legend is on the first page of the atlas, so it gives us more room on the individual pages.  Also, the parcels are colored according to the pressure zone.

Hi Tom,

I was wondering if you'd be willing to share a few details on your G9 Atlas attachment. I am currently creating a Sewer system atlas and have run into the same problem with features being clustered too closely together to be of any use. For the blowups, are they a static snap shot or a dynamic extent indicator? If they are a dynamic extent indicator, then how do you overcome the issue of the extent showing the same area in layout view when you change grids? Eg, in my map layout, when I'm in grid 1D, I have an extent indicator showing the specific intersection. But when I move to 1E, I still see the extent indicator for 1D. I hope that makes sense. Thanks.

[TomMagdaleno]

Hi mtnbker1213,
  The Details are actually a feature dataset in the same geodatabase, and they are in a group layer in the data view, not the layout view.  Their are significantly less features in the detail feature classes, basically just a point, line and polygon feature, but the symbolization is much more extensive so that it can symbolize each feature as any type of feature in the database.

[JoshuaDamron]

Josh, Do you know of some information to help me learn to do the blow-ups?

Jon,

My apologies for not keeping up on this post.  The method we used for creating blow ups is relatively simple.  I created a polygon feature class which I called �??Grid_11x17_Detail�?� for my data driven pages grid which included fields for page #, page title, scale, & rotation. I created a rectangle at the scale I wanted (I think inch 20�??) then centered the feature at the location I needed it, rotated it as needed and set the rotation field & scale field if needed.  I then took this polygon feature and copy and pasted it to other similar locations, repeating a few dozen times and tada!  Data driven detail pages!

In production, I print the utility mapbook .MXD and the Details .MXD to PDF separately and compile them into one book after the fact.  In the utility map I pull in the detail grid as a hollow polygon and labeled it by the page #.  I attached an example detail sheet which goes with the example page I previously posted.

As a side note, at one time I actually created a detail grid of every intersection in town at 1�?�=20�?? scale.  I set it up to print to 8.5�?�x11�?� paper. Unfortunately printing separate book with double sided pages was cumbersome and too thick to be useful.

two things I am going to change in my next mapbook print is that in the past I have inserted the detail pages immediately after the reference page (i.e. my numbering would be 39, 40, 41, 41A, 41B, 41C, 42, 43), however I recently changed my books to be double sided, this has created much complexity for me for several reasons: 

One is that a double sided book is great because it creates one map two pages wide (which the field guys love cause they feel like they can see so much more) but inserting details breaks this up, therein in the future I will have a section at the end of the book for all the detail pages instead of inserting them immediately after the book page. 

Another thing is that I ended up having to have .MXD�??s for both the left and right pages due to my use of a page layout with the page information being along the side margins.  I was looking into this post of Production Mapping: http://blogs.esri.com/esri/arcgis/2012/11/08/streamlining-map-element-placement-with-layout-rules/ but now I�??m looking at Tom�??s book above and am pretty certain that I will be re-organizing my page layout and placing my reference info along the bottom margin to avoid this headache I�??ve created for myself.

I wish you the best!

[TomMagdaleno]

Joshua,
Beautiful map, with highly accurate placement and highly detailed aerial. I used facing pages for my layouts as well. I used a variation of this sample
http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.1/index.html#//00s90000002p000000
with a python script that not only creates them, but puts them together in one PDF. See attached.
Two MXDs were used, one with a left page layout and one with a right page layout and I split my page grid into left and right pages so their were two grid feature classes as well.  G-9 shown above is a right sided page with the extra margin on the left for the page crotch.