ArcPy Intersect without self-intersection

I’m doing an intersection between buffers around street centerlines and census block group geoms.

The extent and density of features is fairly large so I’m running into memory limitations consistent with Getting topology or out of memory errors with large dataset intersects and spatial joins in ArcMap.

I was able to avoid the memory error by reducing the buffer size but may need to find an actual solution.

Looking at the output of the successful intersection, the problem with my code is that the intersection is calculating not just the intersection of buffers with census geoms but also the intersection of the buffers with themselves, which raises the complexity enormously.

The self-intersection is pretty evident in the screen grab below. That’s a selection of all the intersection output features for a single buffer. While my goal is to have a few peices where it intersects the census geoms, it clearly is being cut up by the other buffers from the same layer.

Has anyone found a way to avoid the self-intersection?

Obviously I could dissolve after calculating the intersection but that doesn’t improve the efficiency of the calculation.

I don’t see a better option here but maybe I’m not thinking creatively enough.

As a note, the dice tool isn’t helpful I don’t think because the problem is the number of features not the complexity.