Configure Road Closures

Road Closures can be used to maintain an inventory of road closures and communicate closures and detours to travelers.

In this topic, you'll learn how to configure the Road Closures solution to meet specific needs of your organization.

Organize your data

A growing number of road closures have had an impact on commuters, travelers, delivery drivers, and first responders. Utilities, governments, and other service providers are continually making infrastructure improvements that close roads, for example, and special events and festivals that attract visitors from outside communities are occurring with greater frequency. Many of these infrastructure improvements and special events occur within the public right-of-way. As a result, governments are experiencing a surge in right-of-way (ROW) permit applications and related road closures.

Typically, road closures are defined in traffic management plans submitted with right-of-way (ROW) permit applications. Natural disasters and other emergency incidents that occur in your community may also require a road to be closed. The Road Closures solution can be used to inventory these closures. As you organize your road closure inventory, maps can be shared with internal stakeholders and closure data can be shared with consumer mapping applications.

Before you start your inventory, take some time to review the layers provided in the solution:

Blocks

The Blocks layer represent a barrier set up across a road to prevent traffic from passing. Each feature in this layer represents a unique barrier placed at an intersection or across a roadway.

Closures

The Closures layer represent portions of the roadway where one or more lanes are closed to traffic. Each feature in this layer represents a unique closure along a roadway. This layer is typically shared broadly in an organization and with residents and visitors that navigate throughout your community. As a result, a more detailed description of this layer is provided in the following table, with required fields noted:

Field alias name	Description	Optional or required
Closure ID	Locally assigned road closure identifier	Optional
Street Name	Name of the road that is closed	Required
Direction	Specifies whether road closure affects one or both directions of travel	Required
Reason	Reason for the closure	Required
Lane Impact	Specifies whether some or all the lanes are closed	Required
Access Allowed	Types of vehicles that can access the closure	Optional
Description	Free text description of the closure	Optional
Start Time	Date and time when the closures begins	Required
End Time	Date and time when the closures ends	Required
Alternate Route	Free text description of alternate route around closure	Optional
Contact Name	Contact name inside the organization for the closure	Optional
Contact Email	Contact email inside the organization for the closure	Optional
Contact Phone	Contact phone number inside the organization for the closure	Optional
URL	URL to additional details on the closure	Optional
Active Incident	A flag used to indicate whether the closure applies to an active emergency event	Optional
Street Override	A flag used to indicate whether the street name was manually edited	Optional

Detours

The Detours layer represent the recommended path of travel for vehicles around a closure or road block. Each feature represents a defined detour route that is associated with a closure that might occur during major construction projects or special events.

Configure road name calculation

When you create a new road block or closure the street or intersection is automatically calculated in the editing form. This calculation is using a roads layer for North America from the ArcGIS Living Atlas. If you are outside North America you will need to update the form calculations to use the feature layer for your region. You can also update the calculation to use your own local roads layer.

To update the form calculations to your region, complete the following steps:

1. In a browser, browse to the Esri Basemap Roads Layers group in ArcGIS Online.
2. Find the Feature Layer that corresponds to your region and open the item details page.
3. Copy the item id of the item from the browser url bar.

   Note:

   This is the value in the url after ?id=.

4. Sign in to your ArcGIS organization, and then browse to the Road Closures webmap.
5. Click Open in Map Viewer.
6. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Layers to open the Layers pane and select the Blocks layer.
7. On the Settings (light) toolbar, click Forms to open the Configure form window.
8. Select the Street or Intersection form element to open its Properties pane.
9. In the Properties pane, under Logic, click the Calculated expression button.
10. To the right of Living Atlas Street Name, click the More options button and choose Edit Arcade.

    The Arcade editor window appears. The editor allows you to write and test an expression before saving it to the selected form element.

11. On line 1 in the expression update the roadsItemID variable, the value inside the double quotes, with the item id you copied in step 3.
12. Click Done.
13. Click OK.
14. Repeat steps 6-13 for the Closures layer.
15. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Save and open and click Save.

To update the form calculations to use your own road feature layer, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your ArcGIS organization, and then browse to the Road Closures web map.
2. Click Open in Map Viewer.
3. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Layers to open the Layers pane, and then select the Blocks layer.
4. On the Settings (light) toolbar, click Forms to open the Configure form window.
5. Select the Street or Intersection form element to open the Properties pane.
6. In the Properties pane, under Logic, click the Calculated expression button.
7. To the right of Street Name, click the More options button and choose Edit Arcade.

   The Arcade editor window appears. The editor allows you to write and test an expression before saving it to the selected form element.

8. On line 1 in the expression, for the roadsItemID variable, change the value inside the double quotes to the item ID of your road feature layer.
9. On line 2, update the roadsLayerID variable to the layer ID of the roads layer in your road feature layer.
10. On line 3, update the roadNameField variable to the name of the field that contains the road name in your road feature layer.
11. Click Done.
12. In the Properties pane, under Logic, click the Calculated expression button.
13. Click the Street Name expression to apply the expression to the Street or Intersection form element.
14. Click OK.
15. Repeat these steps for the Closures layer.
16. On the Contents (dark) toolbar, click Save and open and click Save.

Share with Esri Community Maps

Sharing road closures with the public can improve public safety because it alerts residents to potential hazards that may require them to slow down or take a different route. However, most residents use consumer mapping applications to navigate throughout a community and, unfortunately, do not look to local government websites for authoritative closure information. Governments would like to share authoritative closure information with consumer mapping applications to ensure that real-time closure information is available to residents, commuters, and travelers on devices they use every day to navigate through their community.

Governments can deploy the Road Closures solution and use it to map closures in their community that may be caused by construction activity, special events, and emergency incidents. When your organization is ready to share road closures with residents, commuters, and travelers, you can join Esri Community Maps and share your road closure information with Esri. Esri Community Maps regularly aggregates each participating organization's road closure data into a single road closure layer and then shares the aggregated closure information with consumer mapping partners participating in the program.

Joining Esri Community Maps and sharing your Road Closures solution data gives residents in your community access to this information on the devices and applications they typically use.

Note:

If you deployed the Road Closures solution to ArcGIS Enterprise, you must add the RoadClosures_public service as an item in ArcGIS Online before completing the following steps.

To share your road closure information with Esri Community Maps, complete the following steps:

1. Verify that you are signed in to your ArcGIS organization.
2. Browse to your RoadClosures_public layer and open the item page.

   Note:

   You must share the RoadClosures_public layer and populate all the required fields in the Closures layer to participate in Esri Community Maps.

3. Scroll to the Credits section and click Edit.
4. Type the name of your organization as you would like it to appear in the Community Maps Road Closures layer citation.
5. Click Save.
6. Share the layer with Everyone.
7. In a separate browser tab, go to the Esri Community Maps website, click Share Data, and follow the steps to join the community.

   When you share your road closure information with Esri Community Maps, new road closures added by your community will be aggregated into a single layer shared with consumer mapping partners every fifteen minutes.

Create a public road closure map

Focused road closure maps and information can be embedded in your website so they can be accessed by the general public. Maps can be focused on public safety incidents or specific events occurring in a community or they can be more general road closure maps used during road construction season.

To create a public road closure map, complete the following steps:

1. Sign in to your ArcGIS organization.
2. Create a map that can be used by the general public to view road closures by following these steps:
   1. Choose a basemap.
   2. Add the RoadClosures_public layer to the map and remove RoadClosures_public from the layer names.
   3. Save the map as Public Road Closures.
3. Share the map with Everyone.
4. Embed the Public Road Closures map in your public works website.