Getting features for one polygon into another, Geometries do not line up using ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

I have: - Census Blocks - Taxi Zones

The taxi zone shares a rough boundary with census blocks, but there are times where there is overlap due to a rough outline(In image, red line is Taxi Zone, Grey is census block) I know you could go in and manually 'snap' them to one another, but that is extremely time-consuming. I have been attempting to do this using Unions/Integrate/Elimination/Dissolve and other tools, but there always seems to be too many polygons because they get split up by both the Census Block and Taxi Layer.

Answer 1

If you want to get attributes from one polygon set to another (say cenus to taxi - or vice versa) then you would be best doing a Spatial Join. For your use case I'd recommend setting the match_option to HAVE_THEIR_CENTER_IN. This way you don't need to worry about small discrepecies around the edges if the bulk of each polygon is the same.

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To get a sum, count, average etc where you have more than one overlapping feature as per the comment below, you need to use Field Mappings and set merge rules. The advantage of using field mappings even where you only have one overlapping feature is that otherwise the default is to get all the fields of the joined attributes in the output, and you may only be interested in one or a few of them, so you can restrict the output to exactly what you want.

Answer 2

If I understand well the question, it should be solved using the Align Edge tool on the Topology toolbar. Check the ESRI documentation page and this youtube video.