Symbolizing Closed Segments of Roads

[JosephMiller]

I am working at developing a common operational view of road conditions, shelters etc. for use in an EOC. 

One of the problems I'm working on:  I am looking for some straightforward simple but effective ideas for representing segments of roads that are closed.  You can easily use points to denote the beginning and end of a road segment that is closed, but what if you wish to symbolize the portion of the line feature (road centerline) which is truly affected?

Should I simply rely upon onscreen graphics (tracing the portion of road that is closed)?  Or is it better to do onscreen digitizing of the road segments (which can be saved later as shapefiles)?  Or is dynamic segmentation a better approach (doesn't sound simple)?

Any thoughts, ideas are welcomed.

Thanks,
Joe

[TimWitt]

Joe,

If you have an organizational account, I would add your normal road layer as a feature service and then also add a "damaged/closed" road layer, that has edit enabled.

I would create this layer in a geodatabase, which enables you to create domains, which result in dropdown boxes once importat into ArcGIS Online. I would create one column called Active/Inactive depending if the road is still blocked or cleared (with this you can later do a summary of all roads that have been blocked/damaged, without having to delete them). Next I would have a column with the possibilities of the road condition (i.e. blocked, damaged, destroyed...). Later you can use this column to summarize different damage types.

With the new changes coming to the ArcGIS Collector map, your field crew is able to digitize lines and with the dropdowns created in your geodatabase, they can gather information very quickly, regarding road conditions.

Hope this helps!

Fellow EOC GIS person, Tim 🙂