I have 4 multipart polyline shapefiles (download a sample dataset here).
The geometries are identical, except for the length of segments in each shapefile. They represent 4 variables describing an identical shoreline. From these 4 overlapping polylines, I would like to create a resulting polyline that has segments for each unique set of the 4 input lines.
My approach was to use an intersect. This, however, breaks down when I try to run it on 4 huge feature classes.
My question is whether there is a more efficient way to combine polyline attributes stored in separate layers. I thought a union would be good, but it only works on polygons. Spatial Join seems inefficient, as I would end up with many to many joins for a single segment. Turning the segment end points into a point layer, then splitting the line at those points?
I have access to arcpy, PostGIS, and shapely.
Has anyone had experience doing this before on large datasets? Is there a more efficient way to store these variables?