Updates on Isochrones

See also the page with an early service to generate travel time maps.

After my first experiments, described below, I totally re-managed my generation process and data sources (now with Scala, R, imagemagick, openstreetmaps, …). Here are a few new examples for 4 french cities and a zoom on Lausanne. See also the page with travel time in Manhattan.

Let me know if you are interested by getting/buying less-compressed/larger isochrones (contact: click-me ;-p @nospam.com).

Why isochrones (originally, for me)

I want to plan an event with people coming (by car) from different places: Grenoble and Martigny in this case. I want to find a place that is convenient for everybody, so I need maps of how long it would take to travel to a given place from both of these places.

Tech and Results

I played a little with google maps, scriptish (greasemonkey), GNU octave and gnuplot. In the end, I have a semi automated generator for travel-time maps or isochrones, yeah!

Here is what I get as isochrones from Grenoble and Martigny. Note that the map is centered on the area of interest and thus Martigny is in the top right corner of the map.
(Legend blue: 50min, red: 100min, black: 150min)

I actually want a compromise between people coming from Grenoble and Martigny. I weight 1.5x more the people from Grenoble (as there are more of them and I'll be coming from Martigny). Here are two color maps: the weighted average and the weighted max.

And some more, from Martigny, by car or by public transport (click for full size):

What's next? maybe

At different time/space scales, and with various means of transportation, this kind of maps can be very useful. Maybe, I'll push a little this someday.

I'll try to use a simpler way of getting the travel time information (e.g., from databases around openstreetmaps). Maybe this can develop as a service: would you be ready to pay a few dollars to get your custom travel time map?

Any feedback or remarks? Contact me at click-me ;-p @nospam.com.