Final Project

PROJECT OBJECTIVE: Use Python to create an ArcGIS Pro Script Tool that assists planners in the area of land use and transportation coordination focused on improving traffic safety.

NEEDS/SPECIFICATIONS: Alachua County Planning Department and Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) are coordinating their efforts to develop transportation and built environment interventions intended to reduce traffic crashes in the county’s roadways. Due to limited budget, they must be strategic on how they target the intervention areas and prioritize their resources. They require some assistance to identify priority areas that are expected to provide most improvements for their effort.

Script Tool Description

You are asked to create a script tool, namely Traffic Safety Analysis (TSA) in ArcGIS Pro that can identify census block groups based on 3 criteria.

1. Block groups with high crash rate

Crash rate can be calculated as number of crashes per liner roadway mile. Only consider crashes that are within 300 feet of major roads. This rate should be calculated for every block group. Only block groups within the Alachua county should be considered. The block groups are classified into 3 classes by crash rate. The classification is performed as following:

• Low: crash rate between min and (mean + min)/2

• Medium: crash rate between (mean + min)/2 and (max + mean)/2

• High: crash rate greater than (max + mean)/2

Note

Use NumPy to obtain min, max, and mean of the crash rate.

All intervals are right-inclusive.

2. Areas with suitable land uses and proximity

This part of the analysis should be raster-based using the concept of raster overlays also generally referred to as suitability modeling.

• For the purpose of this exercise, suitable areas are considered those that are in proximity to schools, in proximity to residential land use, in proximity to commercial land use (from the landuse feature class in class_data.gdb), and distant from the hospitals. Based on these requirements, create suitability raster grids for each of these proximity layers and categorize them in 9 classes (1 to 9) by using “natural breaks” classification. The extent and mask for all raster geoprocessing are the county boundary and the cell size is 30 (meters).

• Then, create the Final Suitability Raster by considering all four individual proximity suitability and apply the following weights: 30% for proximity to schools, 30% for proximity to residential, 30% for proximity to commercial, and 10% for the hospital suitability.

• Next, convert the output from floating point raster into an integer raster.

The outcome of this step will produce the MOST SUITABLE AREAS. These will be areas that have the value of 9 in the Final Suitability Raster. These areas should be converted to vector (polygons). These areas are considered to have higher potential for successful investment to reduce the traffic crashes when concerning the proximity factors.

3. Final selection

These are those HIGH CRASH RATE BLOCK GROUPS in which the MOST SUITABLE AREAS occupy more than 50% of the block group area.

Part I: Develop the model with ModelBuilder

DELIVERABLE: Submit the model and the resulting feature class produced by your model.

DUE: see schedule

PART II - Python scripting (hard code)

DELIVERABLE: The complete python script in Jupyter Notebook. Make sure that your script is well commented.

DUE: see schedule

PART III - Develop a script tool

The tool should include a front-end graphical user interface (GUI) that will allow the user to select the input data and adjust the input parameters.

The required parameters of the script tool are:

• input gdb (workspace),

• input feature classes - block groups, major roads, crashes, hospitals, schools, and land uses,

• ability to select the landuse (commercial and residential),

• name of the output feature class,

• output path (if it differs from the input gdb),

• an overwrite output checkbox,

• analysis extent and analysis mask,

• cell size,

• weights for each suitability raster.

You may also include other parameters of your choice (not mandatory) such as buffer distance from road, slice reclassification type, etc.

Additionally, the tool should be documented with a Help page to make the use of it self-explanatory, like any other ArcGIS tool. As a reminder, this can be done by going to right-click on the tool -> metadata -> Edit.

Below is shown an illustration of the tool interface:

The tool should be packaged in order to be shared with the County and the MPO. The package should be in ArcGIS Pro folder including the Toolbox with the tool in it, the python script file, the input geodatabase and the ArcGIS Pro project file (the .aprx) that shows the input data. Include a readme.txt file that explains to the user how to open and run the tool.

DELIVERABLE: presentation (see guideline below) and packaged tool files.

DUE: See schedule

Presentation Guideline

• Length: maximum 7 minutes.

• Presentation Focus: The purpose of the presentation is to share your experience with your peers, and not necessarily present your work to the instructors. Given the problem is the same for everyone, there is no need to go in detail for every single step. More or less, the method used by most students are very similar. Therefore, the focus on the presentation should be to show the tool in operation, to share the parts of the project that were more challenging and how you solved them, and to reflect on the learning experience.

• Presentation Content (5-7 slides max)

  • Title Slide

  • Select two challenging parts of the project that you struggled or that show some interesting solution that we either did not cover in class or that was not required, but you think adds value to this project. Explain them and share with the class your solution. Use 1 to 2 slides for each. E.g. one slide shows the problem and the other shows the solution.

  • Final remarks slides (1 or 2 slides): Bullet list of main lessons learned in this project – be specific. Share with the instructor what worked well, what didn’t, and what would you do differently next time.

• Presentation Media: It could be a combination of slides, source code, ArcGIS Pro file etc. Select whatever would be most effective within the limits of available time.

PART IV

ASSIGNMENT: Write an executive summary document about this tool. The document should include the objectives, method, data used, results, discussion, and conclusions. The summary should be minimum 1,000 words without counting any pictures or figures.

DELIVERABLE: Three folders with respective files (see below) packaged as a zip folder.

DUE: see syllabus.