A Procedure for Allocating Zonal Attributes to a Link Network in a Gis Environment

This paper presents a procedure for assigning zone data to links in the context of a Geographic Information System (GIS) environment. This may be used for several applications; the one motivating this paper is the need to approximate how much secondary traffic is accessing the main street network from adjacent zones. This will then be used in models to predict the number of accidents on the main road network. The full procedure consists of three sub-procedures: 1) The splitting of links into shorter segments that either are fully located within one zone or act as a border between the same two zones for their entire length, 2) Identification of all link segments either adjacent to or interior to each zone, and 3) Allocation of the zone attributes to the links associated with each zone, according to attributes of the zones and the links, as well as other information describing the area.