You create routes from line features using the Create Routes tool. You can specify the input line features, the route identifier field, the method used to set the route measures, and the output feature class. Note that the input features can be any ArcGIS supported format. This includes coverage, shapefile, personal, file, and enterprise geodatabase, and computer-aided design (CAD) data.

The Create Routes tool is in the Linear Referencing Tools toolset.

The values in the route identifier field uniquely identify each route feature, which may be created from several features from the input feature class.

The output feature class will be contain the new routes. This feature class can be created within the same geodatabase as the input, or you can save it to another geodatabase or a shapefile. If it is saved to a geodatabase it can be contained within a feature dataset or on its own as a feature class. In this example the new route data will be in a new feature class called "routes" in the same feature dataset as the input feature class.

The next step is to specify how the route measures will be obtained. There are three choices:
• Geometric lengths of the input features can be used to accumulate the measures.
• Values stored in a measure field can be used to accumulate the measures.
• Values stored in from-measure and to-measure fields can be used to set the measures.

In this example you will see how to use the third method.

To do so, click the Measure Source dropdown arrow and click TWO_FIELDS. This will enable both the From-Measure and To-Measure Field input fields.

In this example the From-Measure field is called BEGMP1 and the To-Measure field is called ENDMP1. MP is short for "Mile Post," which is a commonly used method of marking measured locations on roads in the United States of America.