An overview of the Proximity toolset

This topic applies to ArcGIS for Desktop Advanced only.

Contains tools that determine the proximity of features within a coverage or between two coverages.

These tools can identify features that are closest to one another and calculate the distances around and between them. With these tools, you can monitor events in an area, find the area served by a facility, or find the features affected by an activity.

The Buffer tool can be applied to any point, line, polygon, or node feature within an input coverage. The other tools require at least one of the input coverages to be a point coverage.

Tool	Description
Buffer	Creates buffer polygons around specified input coverage features.
Near	Computes the distance from each point in a coverage to the nearest arc, point, or node in another coverage.
Point Distance	Computes the point-to-point distance between each point in a coverage to all points in the same or another coverage within a specified search radius.
Point Node	Performs a spatial JOINITEM on the point coverage and the node coverage. It transfers the attributes from a point feature class to a node feature class. Each point feature in the point coverage is matched to the corresponding node feature in the node coverage. If any point is within the search radius of a node, the attributes are copied.
Thiessen	Converts input coverage points to an output coverage of Thiessen proximal polygons.

Tools in the Proximity toolset