When trying to find the nearest line to a point, how useful are nodes?

Question

I am working with a dataset (OS Open Roads) which consists of lines and nodes in separate shapefiles.

The lines represent the roads themselves.

The nodes represent, for example, the end of a road, or a junction on that road.

I have a collection of points, and would like to find the nearest line (road) to each point.

In such a usecase it seems to me to me reasonable to ignore the nodes.

However, as I am new to GIS, I would like confirmation that I am not missing anything of significance in the node data?

Answer 1

You can ignore nodes. Lines have vertices in the same place where you have the points for end and start points and junctions. More importantly, closest distance can be between the vertices and considering only nodes could give wrong result.