What I was trying to do is intersect these buffers with these census tracts, maintain their ID’s and the tracts attributes. I had some code for Cascaded Unions that was not really working, posted a GIS.StackExchange conversation and was able to get two open souce soluations.

image

See the GitHub page for the data

These buffers are random points. The Census Tracts are from NYC Department of City Planning

The following Code was able to do it. Thanks

GIS.StackExchange conversation

Thanks ThomasG77

import fiona
from shapely.geometry import shape, mapping
import rtree

bufSHP = 'data/h1_buf.shp'
intSHP = 'data/h1_buf_int_ct.shp'
ctSHP  = 'data/nyct2010.shp'

with fiona.open(bufSHP, 'r') as layer1:
    with fiona.open(ctSHP, 'r') as layer2:
        # We copy schema and add the  new property for the new resulting shp
        schema = layer2.schema.copy()
        schema['properties']['uid'] = 'int:10'
        # We open a first empty shp to write new content from both others shp
        with fiona.open(intSHP, 'w', 'ESRI Shapefile', schema) as layer3:
            index = rtree.index.Index()
            for feat1 in layer1:
                fid = int(feat1['id'])
                geom1 = shape(feat1['geometry'])
                index.insert(fid, geom1.bounds)

            for feat2 in layer2:
                geom2 = shape(feat2['geometry'])
                for fid in list(index.intersection(geom2.bounds)):
                    if fid != int(feat2['id']):
                        feat1 = layer1[fid]
                        geom1 = shape(feat1['geometry'])
                        if geom1.intersects(geom2):
                            # We take attributes from ctSHP
                            props = feat2['properties']
                            # Then append the uid attribute we want from the other shp
                            props['uid'] = feat1['properties']['uid']
                            # Add the content to the right schema in the new shp
                            layer3.write({
                                'properties': props,
                                'geometry': mapping(geom1.intersection(geom2))
                            })

Someoone also contributed some OGR code.

Thanks mike-t

cd to the questions directory (not the data one)

ogr2ogr -sql "SELECT ST_Intersection(A.geometry, B.geometry) AS geometry, A.*, B.* FROM nyct2010 A, h1_buf B WHERE ST_Intersects(A.geometry, B.geometry)" -dialect SQLITE data data -nln h1_buf_int_ct2