Is Your Enterprise GIS Getting the Most Value out of Your Road Centerlines?
For local governments, road centerlines are second only to tax parcels in their versatility for supporting many different local government studies and operations. Yet too often, they are under utilized and undervalued in terms of the innovative and productive ways they can be applied:
- Cartography: create maps labeled with road names, highway shields labeled with route numbers, and roads symbolized for the motoring public. A well symbolized road map is essential to public access web sites promoting tourism and economic development.
- Address matching by road name alias: did you know it is possible to address match using road name aliases? Perhaps the official road name spelling differs from the street sign, the road name is a numbered street that is sometimes spelled out, or a named road also has a traffic route number? No problem with alias geo-coding, because your GIS will find the correct address location using any variant! Geo-coding by alias is extremely valuable to all local government operations and public access web sites.
- Master Street Address Guide (MSAG) reconciliation: improve the quality of your centerline road names and the accuracy of your MSAG file by reconciling the two data sets. Once reconciled, you can use the road centerline file to generate an up-to-date MSAG file for scrubbing telephone company addresses of land lines!
- Linear Referencing System (LRS): If your planning department is a member of a Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO), chances are that it needs to map state DOT data to plan improvements that increase public safety or reduce congestion. Adding the DOT’s LRS framework attributes to local government centerlines enables you to do so. And, it is also possible to provide locally generated roadway information such as traffic counts back to the state DOT using the same LRS framework attributes. This win-win data exchange benefits all parties!
- Vehicle Routing: While E911 has the most obvious need to route emergency vehicles in the most time efficient manner, other local government operations also benefit from vehicle routing solutions. A sheriff serves multiple bench warrants each day, a social service worker needs to conduct several home visits on the same afternoon, an engineer needs to inspect weights and measures at service stations, and a para-transit agency needs to pick up and discharge passengers on-demand. The potential savings in fuel and labor might even offset the expense of adding this functionality to a road centerline dataset!
- Service Area Modeling: centerlines can also be used to evaluate response zones and service areas for existing or planned facilities based on travel time or distance. For example, a comprehensive plan tries to ensure that all areas of a county are within a defined response time of fire and ambulance services. Planning the location for a new emergency evacuation center, library, park and ride lot, school, senior center, or district court house needs to account for the number of people that can be served within certain time or distance thresholds from the planned facility.
Contact us today to discuss how geographIT™ can get your next road centerline project moving in the right direction.
Software Requirements:
- ArcEditor 9.x
- ArcGIS 9.x Network Analyst Extension for vehicle routing and service area modeling
- ArcSDE 9.x