If you've ever wondered 'how far can I drive within 30 minutes?' you're not alone. Hundreds of people each week are looking to discover a way to draw a driving polygon on a Google map.
Using Google Distance Matrix to make this shape means you'll either need to fire lots of expensive requests to the Google Routing API or you'll end up with a very basic polygon. The tutorial linked below is a walkthrough of how to make this visualization using the TravelTime API. You can sign up for a free trial key from TravelTime without adding your billing details.
The API works by calculating every possible latitude/longitude coordinate that rests on the travel time parameter. You will only need to make 1 API request to visualize a travel time polygon (aka isochrone).
The shape above is an example of a 15 minute drive time area in Central London. Travel time polygons can be any size from 5 minutes to 4 hours. It's also possible to use the tutorial to create polygons for walking, cycling, public transport, or combined transport modes.
Use cases
- Draw many polygons for 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30 mins to see a heat map of where's reachable in different time catchments.
- Overlap polygons and visualise where's mutually reachable by two or more start locations.
- Combine polygons together. For example draw a 30 minute travel time area around every supermarket in the country. Combining this shapes will polarise the map to see the total accessible zones and total inaccessible zones.