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I have polyline shapes representing roads and another shape layer with polygons that are representing buildings. I have to find some way with ArcPy to measure the distance from a point within the polyline road,usually in the middle, to the nearest buildings at both sides of the road. Graphically it would be something like this

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In short, I'd need some way to use a kind of Near tool but with the functionality about measuring in the direction I want to.

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  • Have a look at this thread for identifying if a point on left or right side of a straight line. Also this tool might help?
    – Hornbydd
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 11:24
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    Linear Referencing is what I would use, since it has tools like a Near analysis that tells the side of the line a point is on. However, I am curious to know why you think you need this information. It seems oddly specific and not very relevant to geocoding. Understanding why you want to know this could lead in a different direction that solves your real problem better. Also, is each segment with a point independent of all other segments for determining the side of the line, or do you have to respect the entire zig-zag path for determining the side that your building falls on?
    – Richard Fairhurst
    Commented May 3, 2016 at 14:36
  • I'm explaining better: I need to get the two closest shapes to both sides of a road (polyline) from the middle and measure the size between those points in order to finally get an average width. Thank you for your response.
    – manuasir
    Commented May 4, 2016 at 8:19

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Finally I got the way. What I did was to create perpendicular lines (Polylines) to roads and get the intersection (arcpy.Intersect_analysis) with buildings, then I calculate the distance between those points.

Result of the script. Each axis has information about the width and the road that are intersecting with

Script code is available in https://github.com/manuasir/Arcpy_Roads_Width for anyone that needs it.

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