A few months ago I had the opportunity to work with Marc Healy at the Granite School District Transportation department. He was sending me corrections he needed to have performed on the SGID roads layer. He told me that he was using the layer for a network. I asked him to tell his story and provide some instructions, this follows below.
I had originally thought of using the road layer as a network dataset about 2 years ago but I ran into problems because the dataset didn’t have certain attributes I needed. At the time, I contacted UGRC and was told that they were in the middle of setting up the parameters for a complete set of attributes, which included the ones I needed. Since this dataset would not work at the moment for what I needed, I turned to a private provider and purchased their road data for about $2500/year. This dataset allowed me to route buses across our district without a problem. It worked pretty well out of the box and only needed minimal set up. As we progressed through the year we changed our routing system to an online, GIS based software and it required a server version of this dataset or for us to provide our own road layer. The server version was around $20,000/year which was way beyond our budget so I turned back to the UGRC road layer as a solution to this problem. After reading several online forums and blogs I came up with how to use this dataset for routing and wrote those instructions on how to do it. While using this road layer takes time to set up, and has errors – which take time to fix – it has been well worth the savings for our district. The errors are easily resolved, and by sending the fixes to UGRC I am helping improve this dataset for anyone else who chooses to use it.