Creating Road Polygons from Lines - Using the Buffer Tool in ArcGIS Pro

When is a line not a line? When it turns into a polygon! This question is all about scale. At a national level, roads are always line features, but if you are mapping at the scale of an individual school for example, roads can be mapped as polygons. However lines are easier to digitise! So here we use a line feature and the buffer tool to convert our road centrelines into polygons. It's a bit of a cheat, but works well if you don't need to have 100% precision or accuracy. Otherwise you probably should just go the slow route and digitise the full polygon :)

[@GSP96]

Thank you so much for the video! It was a very clear tutorial. With covid happening I haven't been able to get in touch with my professor and your videos have been a great help.

[@DrKJoyce]

Thanks for the feedback, I"m glad that it's been helpful for you!

[@shoojohnn418]

How did you add ROADS on the CONTENT pls i would like to know.🙏

[@Alistarwormwood]

I had this same issue. I know it's been 2 years, but maybe this will help someone else. I wasn't able to create the new feature class because there was something that was unsaved. I looked at the attribute table for infrastructure and yea, I forgot to save it after making changes. ArcGIS won't let you create something new without saving what you have already first.

[@josiah_adfhaiti]

Helped me do excatly what I wanted to do. Thank you!!!

[@DeadShot618]

Thank you!

[@softbunny9068]

What if when I’m using the buffer tool it says output feature class already exists? How do I fix this?

[@DrKJoyce]

change your filename to something that doesn't already exist