The GEO-Jobe Blog

One difficult task for me in ArcMap is finding an intersection of two roads. Much of my work is in the state of New Jersey and often times I’m asked to map a new site location from as little as an address or intersection. The NJDOT has a terrific roads layer, however it is difficult to search the entire data set.

Many roads throughout the state share the same name, and some roads have the Highway number, not the common names. I randomly chose Main St and High St as an intersection to search for in ArcMap. 186 results for the two street names!

Enter Google Earth. Searching for an intersection in Google Earth provides excellent results and even offers up alternative answers if you know the city or town.

Once I’ve chosen the appropriate location (the second alternative offered by GE), right click on the pin location and check the properties to get the Latitude and Longitude.

In ArcMap I use the “Go to XY” tool to paste in the coordinates and I can zoom to the exact location! Make sure you choose “Degrees Minutes Seconds” to get Lat and Long instead of X and Y.

The green dot was added from the Go to XY toolbar. The streets weren’t even part of my 186 selected features! Because I searched for “MAIN ST” and the NJDOT geodatabase has it as “MAIN STREET”. And High St was tagged as Essex County 638.

Filed under: ArcGIS Desktop, Data, Google, Google Earth, Maps