Hi all,

I am attempting a spatial join, and am wondering if I am going about this the correct way (using Arcmap). The goal: I have two shapefiles on counties(polygons) and on highways(lines). I want ultimately a dataset for each county that lists the distance between the center of the county and the nearest highway. I have the shapefiles in long/lat projections, so a spatial join right away is in terms of degrees and not a linear physical distance. My problem here is just not having a baseline in order to make sure I am doing this correctly, or that the end distance points I receive are what I ultimately want in the end. I wanted to list the steps I took, and hopefully get comments/advice on if I am doing this correctly or what I should do differently:

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1. I converted the counties into centroids using the 'feature to point' tools, and used the 'inside' option to ensure the centroids are restricted to being within the county borders.
2. I used the project tool to change the projections from wgs 1984 into Mercator projections (The country I am dealing with is on the equator, so I think this is a safe way to go about this). I did this for both the centroids and the highways to create new layers ( I am unsure if this is the step I am supposed to take).
3. From the new centroid layer, I went to joins, used the converted highway layer as the the layer i wish to join, and used the option "Each point will be given all the attributes of the point in the layer being joined that is closest to it, and a distance field showing how close that point is (in the units of the target layer)

The numbers I am getting on the surface seem correct, and looking at the properties, the join output does seem to be under the right projection (Mercator) and Linear unit (Meter). But I am wondering if anything in these steps seems obviously wrong, and if there are standard practices to verify my end output.

Thank you all! any advice would be appreciated