I'm trying to find the shortest edge-to-edge distance between polygons in a layer. An example is a table of the distances from county to county in a state. I'm attempting to use the generate near table tool. I set the proximity to 0 and made sure to de-select only the nearest neighbor. It runs for a few hrs, but when its finished, the ouput only returns the distance of the 1 nearest neighbor, which is 0 because they are touching each other. Any help would be much appreciated!
-Kevin
Best Answer
The Near calculations in my experience are only based on the vertices of the polygon, so I found that as long as you made sure not to select only closest in the dialog box and selected a number for the total number, in your case the number of counties - 1 then it should work fine. I did my test on cadastral parcels and set this number to 50, and the near table generated gave me the top 50 closest polygons.
Now as I said this is going to be vertex to vertex as this is the way the tool works. Another option to achieve the edge scenario is to generate a centroid feature class of the counties and then do your near calculations on this and then verify the results from the vertex table generated in the above method.
Hope this helps, CDB