How to join number of point features into attribute of nearest line segment using ArcGIS Desktop?

Question

I have point shapefile with lot of attributes, that represent road accidents and line shapefile with highways. What I want is to join attribute into line shapefile with value, that represent number of accidents which happened on each road segment (line segment in shapefile). First idea was to create buffer around line segments which was used to locate accidents, but I don't know what to do next.

I need this to create simple line diagram map (exactly this one http://athena.zcu.cz/kurzy/gish/000/HTML/37/Ob98.jpg) and I want to know some possibilities of cartographic visualization from these data, not only joining number of accidents, but some idea to use attributes in data too. I'm talking about simple line diagram map.

I am using ArcGIS Desktop 10.

Answer 1

i was doing similar to that and i did it by :

• using near tool that will add nearest street ID field in the accidents table

• then using the frequency tool it will create table contains the count of each street ID from the previous output

• last stem using join with the streets table you will get what u want :D

Answer 2

Use Spatial Join to Joins attributes from one feature (Points) to another (Streets) based on the spatial relationship.

I have not tried it but I guess JOIN_ONE_TO_ONE is the right option to aggregate values (count points).

Answer 3

Best is to use Linear Referencing tool.