I have a polygon shapefile containing polygons representing green spaces and a point shapefile of postcode centroids and am hoping to carry out closest facility analysis in ArcMap to calculate the shortest distance from each postcode to a green space. However it doesn't seem that I can load locations as incidents or facilities which are polygons, as whenever I try a message comes up reading "the input features must have the correct geometry type or have location fields".
Because of this I was alternatively thinking of creating a point layer of access points by manually digitizing them for each green space, so that I could carry out the analysis with these instead, since points seem to load fine as locations. However, as I have a few hundred green spaces, it will be very time consuming to work out where all the access points are and then digitise them. So I was wondering whether there is a way I can just load the polygons as locations to use in the network analysis, or whether there's perhaps a way in which I can intersect the network dataset with the green space polygons to create a point shapefile of the points where they both intersect?
I suppose this would essentially generate a layer of access points I could use, rather than having to manually digitize them all, but I'm not sure whether it's possible to do this or not?