Community Spring Cleaning week is here! Join your fellow Maveryx in digging through your old posts and marking comments on them as solved. Learn more here!

Alteryx Designer Desktop Discussions

Find answers, ask questions, and share expertise about Alteryx Designer Desktop and Intelligence Suite.
SOLVED

Calculate the distance between addresses

George_Fischetti
8 - Asteroid

Hi all,

 

I'm new to Alteryx and this is my first post in the community, looking forward to engaging with such talented individuals!!

 

My issues are as follows:

  • I'd like to calculate the distance (in miles) between two addresses.   
  • I do not have the Geospatial license and also do not have latitude/longitude.   I'm limited to Address 1, City, State, Zip.   
  • I'm not certain that my company allows 3rd party API's. 

Do I have any alternatives?  Can I use the tools in the basic Designer to accomplish this task?  

Appreciate any input.

Thanks!

George

 

 

9 REPLIES 9
apathetichell
18 - Pollux

Spatial distance functions will only work with lat/long/spatial objects. If it's a small amounts perhaps get the lats and longs manually (ie google) and then run the process? Otherwise - I do not believe this is readily doable hence why companies make money with spatial analytics/geocoding packages.

George_Fischetti
8 - Asteroid

I was actually afraid this would be the answer....thank you for your input!!

apathetichell
18 - Pollux

Depending upon your R skills - you could try something like this discussed here:

https://towardsdatascience.com/breaking-down-geocoding-in-r-a-complete-guide-1d0f8acd0d4b

 

or try Geopy  via the python tool.

Ben_H
11 - Bolide

Hi @George_Fischetti,

 

This is an interesting question - in the UK it's quite easy to build your own geocoder as the UK Post Office publishes an "PAF" file every year giving address data with Lat/Longs included.

 

It made me wonder if there isn't a US equivalent

 

I came across the Dept. of Transport National Address Database. https://www.transportation.gov/gis/national-address-database/national-address-database-0

 

It's apparantly not complete yet but it should give you something usable to start from if your state is covered.

 

Regards,

 

Ben

 

 

George_Fischetti
8 - Asteroid

Thank you, my Python skills are not up to par.  Appreciate the suggestion!

George_Fischetti
8 - Asteroid

Thank you, will give this a look, interesting!!

kelly_gilbert
13 - Pulsar

@George_Fischetti - one more potential option, depending on the level of precision required:

If your addresses are in the US, the US Census Bureau has a free geocoder (with a 10,000 address limit - not sure if this is daily?)

  • The caveats are in the link above, but the data source is mostly residential areas, and that lat/lon returned is interpolated
  • If you aren't able to use it dynamically as an API, you can upload a file and get bulk results through the web interface
George_Fischetti
8 - Asteroid

@kelly_gilbert, thank you - I will give this a shot!!

NJT
11 - Bolide

Once you have your lat/long for your two addresses it is fairly easy to do the rest.. hardest part being getting the lat/long if you have a large file. 

Labels