I have a line feature class that represents greenways and trails. Many of the trails have been mapped with a recreation grade GPS. As more GPS tracks or new aerial photos become available, I ‘refine’ many of the line features using the following steps:
1) Split the line in two places: at the start and at the end of where I need to redigitize the line
2) Select the line segment that is to be deleted
3) Delete this line segment
4) Redigitize the line segment with the more accurate alignment
5) Merge the redigitized portion with the portions of the original line that were not redigitized
Although the resulting line is one feature, the order of the vertices often becomes very fragmented. This may seem inconsequential, but it has repeatedly caused the following problem. In step 2 above portions of the line that are far from the segment am redigitizing are inadvertently selected. See the attached jpeg for an example. The selected feature is one feature. These unintentionally selected line segments are often off the screen. When I delete the portion that I intend to delete, the portion that’s off the screen can be deleted accidentally. Yes, I can and should be more careful by verifying that that only the portion I intend to delete is selected. But there are other reasons why I would like to have cleaner lines.
This line feature class is stored in SDE, so the Check Geometry tool is futile. Dissolve probably isn’t a good approach because I need the trails to remain individual line segments at intersections – we may use these lines in a routing scenario some day. Create Routes drops the attributes and I don’t want to deal with M values – linear referencing is not needed here.
Suggestions?