Add isochrones to your next application

Mapbox
maps for developers
2 min readJun 20, 2017

By Peter Liu

Isochrones reflect the total area you can reach, within a given time and mode of transportation. Historically, they’ve helped answer questions like:

  • What kind of foot traffic can we expect for a store, at this location?
  • If we put a bus stop there, how many riders will live within a 5-minute walk?
  • How many homes can a firehouse serve within a 10-minute drive?

Today we’re sharing a plugin to generate your own isochrones, right in your browser. With a starting location and Mapbox access token, the plugin will calculate isochrones up to 60 minutes via driving, cycling, or walking.

Under the hood, the plugin calls the Mapbox Matrix API to sample travel times in a grid pattern around the desired starting point. It then passes the results to a CONREC algorithm to interpolate geometric shapes out of these points. Depending on the location and network conditions, a 60-minute isochrone will generate in 3–5 seconds on a client. Recent improvements to our Matrix API allow batching queries into a single call, greatly speeding up this calculation.

Check out the live demo. Drag the round marker to set a new origin, and toggle the form fields to change direction, duration, and mode of travel.

60-minute isochrone emanating from just north of London. Note how far a car can travel northward, away from the city, compared to the squeeze entering downtown directly to the south.

Mapbox isochrone
Mapbox isochrone

Show us what you create with the isochrone plugin @Mapbox, or contact sales to add isochrones to your commercial application.

Free

Distraction-free reading. No ads.

Organize your knowledge with lists and highlights.

Tell your story. Find your audience.

Membership

Read member-only stories

Support writers you read most

Earn money for your writing

Listen to audio narrations

Read offline with the Medium app

Written by Mapbox

mapping tools for developers + precise location data to change the way we explore the world

Responses (1)

Write a response