Drive time map

Choose a place and the map shows the area you can reach from it by car, bicycle or on foot in the times you pick: a travel time map, or isochrone. Each band comes with its area.

How to use it

  1. Search for a place, press My location, or click the map to set the start.
  2. Choose how you travel: drive, cycle or walk. Pick up to four times.
  3. Press Draw. Each band is the ground you can reach within that time. Hover a band for its time.
  4. Press GeoJSON to download the bands, or Copy link to share the map.

5 practical uses

  1. Decide where to live by how far the office is in 30 minutes at real road speeds.
  2. Draw the delivery area a driver can serve in 20 minutes from a kitchen.
  3. Plan the coverage of a fire station, an ambulance or a clinic.
  4. Find the shops, parks or schools within a 15-minute walk of a home.
  5. Show a client how much of a city a sales team reaches in an hour.

The maths behind it

The routing engine runs a time-limited Dijkstra search from the start over the road graph, with each edge costing its length divided by the speed allowed for the mode. The set of reached nodes is turned into a contour with a marching-squares pass over a grid of arrival times, then simplified. The areas shown are geodesic areas of those polygons.

What the bands mean

An isochrone joins the points that take the same time to reach along the road network. The engine walks outward from the start along every road at the speed that road allows, and draws the edge of what it reaches in each time. Holes and ragged edges are real: a river with few bridges, a motorway with no exits, a park with no roads.

Times are typical for the road type, without live traffic, so a rush-hour drive covers less. Cycling assumes about 20 km/h on the flat, walking about 5 km/h; the engine avoids roads a bicycle or a pedestrian may not use.

Where the routes come from

Routes come from Valhalla, an open routing engine on OpenStreetMap data run by FOSSGIS, the German OpenStreetMap association. It is a public, best-effort service: it can be slow at busy times, and a route through a badly mapped area is only as good as the map. Nothing else about you is sent with the request.

Export the bands as GeoJSON to use them elsewhere, for instance in the GeoJSON viewer or a GIS.

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Questions and answers

What is an isochrone?

A line joining the points that take the same time to reach. The engine walks outward from the start along every road at the speed that road allows and draws the edge of what it reaches in each time.

Does it include traffic?

No. Times use typical speeds for each road type, so a rush-hour drive covers less ground than the band shows.

Why is there a hole or a ragged edge?

Those are real: a river with few bridges, a motorway with no exit, a park without roads. Cycling and walking also avoid roads those modes may not use.

Embed this tool on your website

Paste this code where the tool should appear. It shows the tool alone, without this page's text, and links back here. It is free to use; the map data credit stays on the map.

<iframe src="https://waymorphic.com/tools/drive-time-map?embed=1" width="100%" height="760" style="border:0;border-radius:12px;max-width:100%" loading="lazy" allow="geolocation; fullscreen; clipboard-write" title="Drive time map – Waymorphic Map"></iframe>

Change height to suit your page. To open the tool with a place already set, add the settings from this page's address bar (the part after #) to the end of the src. The embedded tool asks the visitor's browser for their location only when they press the button, and the allow attribute lets that work inside the frame.