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I am new to GIS and I would appreciate if you could guide me a little.

I have a .gdb folder with data and I need to process that data to find educational institutions which are within say X Km of the Roads.....And within Y Km of any other educational institution....

I need to generate a shape file with the resulting data.

Could you please tell me how shall i go about this?

Do i need to install ArcGIS to do this? Or is it possible to do this in ArcPy alone?

I am pretty ok with Python and I would appreciate if someone could guide me with a Python Snippet.....I am not looking for full code but just an idea to get me started.

Appreciate your help on this one.

Regards, Guddu

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I've never been under the impression that you could use ArcPy without installing ArcGIS. – Nathanus Dec 15 '11 at 15:30
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Yes, @Nathanus is absolutely right: ArcGIS must be installed in order to use arcpy. – nmpeterson Dec 15 '11 at 16:25
You can use Arcpy if you have an ArcEngine License. But yes, a form of ArcGIS does need to be installed. – OptimizePrime Dec 15 '11 at 21:37

1 Answer

up vote 4 down vote

Buffer your road and school layer by your X and Y search distance. Then do a select by location to see what schools are selected from the road buffer. To find what schools intersect each other yoiu could run the Intersect tool on the school buffer. These tools are common among both open source and proprietary GIS programs.

Specifically, in ArcMap you could run these operations in Model Builder than export out the code to python.

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There's no need to export to Python if you have a working model. – Jason Scheirer Dec 15 '11 at 18:36
Unless you want to know the arcpy syntax! – Nathanus Dec 15 '11 at 21:28

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