Help with measuring distances between facilities

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03-01-2011 03:48 AM
Jose_F_Martinez_Colon
New Contributor
Greetings!

I am trying to figure out how to determine distances for the municipal solid waste (MSW) management purposes in an island with over 70 counties/municipalities. I have a roads shapefile for the study area, and I digitized a point shapefile with various MSW facilties (landfills, composts, materials recovery facilities, transfer stations, and combustion facilities. The current facilities do have addresses (not included in the shapefile I created of course) but there are several proposed facilities that do not have addresses (so their positions are within the particular county as proposed by the proposing agency). I would like to know if there is a way (or ways) to determine distances for the following: 1) from the roads in each county to a particular facility (let it be landfill, MRF, compost, or waste-to-energy; which would be contained in the point shapefile), and 2) possibly from one facility to another (say from the roads in a county, then to a transfer station, and then to a landfill/compost/MRF/WTE facility). The roads shapefile is georeferenced to the study area's coordinate system (as defined by the agency that created it) and its fields include Type of road, road number, and length.

Thank you for your help!
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JaySandhu
Esri Regular Contributor
You can also look at the following post on how to get the location on the road where a point may snap to and it's distance.
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/29022-Can-points-be-automatically-moved-to-the-street-lines

Else, the OD CostMatrix is perfect for computing road/network distances between sets of locations.
http://help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#/OD_cost_matrix_analysis/00470000004r00...

Jay Sandhu
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