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