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Below is a famous map produced by the Facebook team, which shows the connections between their users. Where there are multiple overlapping features, the lines show more brightly, giving a clear indication of feature density.

enter image description here

How can this effect be emulated in ArcMap? For example, is it possible to show individual features with a set transparency, and stack these features with the transparency values accumulating to show where multiple features coincide?

The standard > Display > Transparency option applies to the whole layer equally.

The Facebook example uses light features on a dark background, but I'm also interested in dark features on a light background.

PolyGeo
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Stephen Lead
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    This is a more specific version of this question. QGIS is really good at it. – alphabetasoup Mar 22 '16 at 04:59
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    If you uncover an ArcGIS for Desktop solution there are at least three other questions that could benefit with being rolled up into one canonical Q&A and its duplicates: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/4771/how-to-obtain-overlapping-semi-transparent-circles-effect, http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/49145/displaying-transparent-overlapping-polygons-in-arcgis-for-desktop and http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/107608/overlapping-transparent-polygons-wont-darken – PolyGeo Mar 22 '16 at 05:05
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    I have not actually done it, but I think the ArcGIS tool would be the Line Density tool in the Spatial Analyst Extension. http://help.arcgis.com/En/Arcgisdesktop/10.0/Help/index.html#/How_Line_Density_works/009z00000012000000/ – RHB Mar 22 '16 at 16:27
  • Did you ever look at or try the technique in http://gis.stackexchange.com/a/125189/115 that is link-only to https://luke-webber.github.io/polyline-heatmap/? It seems to have come up again at http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/197844/arcgis-create-heatmap-of-line-features – PolyGeo Jun 10 '16 at 04:47

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Although some ArcGIS for Desktop answers have been provided at Making map where overlapping symbols increase Opacity?, I do not think there is a good solution for doing this in ArcMap.

I think this would be a good candidate for ArcGIS Ideas if you need it in ArcMap, but it looks like the functionality you are after may already be in ArcGIS Pro - see the ArcGIS blog post Increase your transparency with ArcGIS Pro.

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PolyGeo
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