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The circle shows an intersection with several lines representing a main road that I would like to be just one line. I'm attempting to find a way to merge all main roads in this manner, as efficiently as possible, without affecting the smaller roads such as cul de sacs. I have a lot of maps to go through. Is this even possible, or will I have to target and remove all superfluous roads manually?
I'm looking to achieve something closer to this:
I'm working with Adobe Illustrator CC
There's no way to do this automatically in Illustrator, even if you have a kickass set of CAD plugins. Your best bet is to move all the paths that represent arterials onto their own layer, so you can manipulate them without messing anything else up. Clean up each "road" so that it's only a single path (i.e. delete all but the center line) and then increase the weight until you have the desired width. If you're lucky and the paths aren't thousands of tiny straight segments positioned end to end you could then outline those paths and you will then have more options for fill/stroke & shape manipulation (CAD programs sometimes e this with drawings exported into a format readable by Illustrator)
Repeat this for every road type if you think you might need to.
Layers are your friends; learn to love (and use) them.
