I am creating a bicycle route data using a road dataset. My road dataset ID field does not follow (in order) with my bicycle route. I'm wanting to create an ID field that traces my route and orders the ID by that route from start to finish. How can I best do this? I would prefer not to type in manually as there is more than 100 segments and re-typing in the ID numbers manually would take some time. Thanks for your help.
- Here's a brain storm. I could not get the license to run Arc Info needed for some steps in this process.
- Make a copy of your route layer.
- Merge the copied bike route segments to create specific routes. I assume you would have more than one.
- From the original routes, create points at the ends of line segments. (Data Management Tools.tbx\Features\Feature Vertices To Points)
- Use a tool to split the recreated lines at the points. (Data Management Tools.tbx\Features\Split Line at Point - shoudl have an end point only option)
- I'm assuming that the newly split line will have ID numbers that are sequential. If not, this is procedure is not helpful. I did this sequentially going a long a short route at verticies manually with the split line function. The resulting segments had sequential numbers, but they were 0, 1, 3, 5, ... and not 1, 2, 3, .... It should be possible to manipulate the numbers using the calculator to convert them to 1, 2, 3, ....
- Spatially join the newly split line segments with the original segments and using the calculator transfer the sequential IDs to a route number field.
If you are just duplicating the road IDs into another field use the field calculator to do the value transfer. Similarly if you are assigning one number to many segments use the field calculator with a selected set of segments.
Network Analyst would be your best bet for creating the routes. It works like MapQuest and you could set begin, mid and end points of your bike routes derived from your existing road network to build new routes. I believe it will properly ID the route segment order of the lines it builds as part of its output (although that is a guess, since I really have not used it myself).
However, if you mean that you want to assign unique IDs to every segment to define an ordered route trace not built by Network Analyst, that is a manual process. Bicycle routes do not follow any required rule pattern that can be automated that I know of. For your specific set of bike routes you may have followed a pattern that would account for the vast majority of routes. If you could express those rules systematically you could program an ID assignment process to do it. But unless you are a skilled programmer, the effort to write that code will take longer than to manually assign IDs to 100 or so segments. I would only bother to write a program when I had at least 5000 segments, since tackling the complexity of route tracing in a custom program is a huge undertaking.