Hi Jessica:
I am answering this e-mail from home and I do not have ARCGIS on my machine but at work, I wanted to calculate the "uneveness" of an area around some of our facilities or subway stations. A subway station entrance at street level can be very high in elevation in Washington Heights, a hilly part of Manhattan and still be flat and easy to pass by walking. What I did, from memory is as follows:
1) For each facility or stop, choose a buffer, let us say, a half mile.
2) Bring in an altitude-contour file of elevations, this is not a raster file but a vector file. Make sure that you can see that each contour has a label showing elevation.
3) I believe you do a spacial join so that each facility or stop will be associated with a selection of elevations based on the contour file.
4) The next step is the hardest: You will need to select those contour lines that are within, touches, or intersects the buffer border. I do not know if you are familiar with contour maps, but you can have a peak within the buffer area and this contour line at the peak may not be selected. You have to experiment to get most of the contour lines in.
5) Do the spatial join and select the detail table rows generated.
6) Create a report using elevation as the main field. In this way you can get for each buffer area the low and high elevation, average and standard deviation. A buffer that has a high SD implies that there is a great deal of roughness in the area of the buffer, which can be the area around a station or facility.
I did this using no special tools. I do not have a delux package of ARCGIS.
I hope this helps: