3 replies to this topic

[wick]

I am interested in labeling the distances between select cities and/or exits on a large highway map, and I'm wondering what methods others are using.
Does anyone have experience in creating such milage (and/or km) notations in at least a somewhat automated way?

Thank you,
-Jesse

[Hans van der Maarel]

You can calculate the length of every road segment and then place that number as a text next to that particular road. This is something that can be done in pretty much any GIS.

It gets more tricky if you want to add mileage markers and want them to coincide with the real markers next to the roads. That can't be done accurately without actually knowing those locations.

[paul]

If you are using ArcMap 9.x you can use the Linear Referencing toolset. This will assign measures (m-values) to a polyline, which opens up all sorts of nice analysis, symbolization, and labeling. We use this quite a bit for creating mile markers with labels. It's fairly automated once you get the hang of it, and there is a .pdf tutorial that comes with ArcMap that teaches how to use it.

If you are looking for good mile marker symbolization, ArcScripts has a road mile marker styleset (DDV).

http://arcscripts.es....asp?dbid=12413

[MapMedia]

Sounds like you have a select set of cities & exits? Then this could be done for all roads as Paul mentioned then select from this dataset those you want to label.

Some state Transportation departments have statewide postmile layers - I know Calif does. These are typically just the state maintained roads with postmiles assigned to each segment. In Calif, postmiles start at 0 as the road enters a county. Chris