Abstract

A GIS Methodology to Calculate Road Slope for Large Areas
Track: Transportation
Author(s): Dolph Scott

There is a need to identify where the steepest sloped roads are located in Travis County to ensure safe emergency service routing. During an average year, Travis County can expect one day of freezing precipitation in the form of sleet or freezing rain. This is a particularly large problem for areas in West Austin and Travis County due to steep hills from the area known as the Balcones Fault. Traditional slope methodology using raster grid cells will not accurately identify the relatively narrow paved street surfaces. An alternative is to use common GIS data sets, which many municipalities already have. This method only requires Contours and Street Centerlines for the data sets and ArcMap 9.2 for the processing. The resulting data set provided a slope percentage for each of the 6,873 miles of roads in Travis County.

Dolph Scott
City of Austin
3635 RR 620 South
Austin , Texas 78738
United States
Phone: 512-263-6440
Fax: 512-263-1276
E-mail: dolph.scott@ci.austin.tx.us