Selecting nearest 300 buildings (polygons/centroids) from list of points using ArcGIS for Desktop?

Question

I have been trying to look for an easy/quick way to select a certain amount of polygons (layer 1) from a 90 points shapefile (layer 2).

The idea is to identify the nearest 300 buildings from each of the 90 vaccination sites. Selecting these buildings based on a distance is easy but based on the number of features around it seems much more complicated.

I could not find any good way (I tried "Near", "Make Closest Facility", "Neighborhood location"...but they don't seem to do what I'm looking for).

I can't find any tool doing this. Doing this for only 1 point is ok but for a larger number of points is not obvious.

Any suggestion?

I'm using ArcGIS 10.3 for Desktop.

Answer 1

you could use "spatial join" to get the distance between the building and the vaccination center. If your vaccination centers are far apart, then you can do it in one go. Otherwise, some building could belong to two or more vaccination areas, so you need to select the 300 closest building for each poit separately. Then you need to use a Python or, if you don't want Python, the model builder (Iterate feature selection).

As a remark, you can look at this post to select the 300 closest when you have a valid distance field.

Answer 2

To do this I think you should use the Generate Near Table (Analysis) tool which:

Calculates distances and other proximity information between features in one or more feature class or layer. Unlike the Near tool, which modifies the input, Generate Near Table writes results to a new stand-alone table and supports finding more than one near feature.

Unfortunately, this tool requires an Advanced level license.