Isochrone map: drive time and travel time

An isochrone is the area you can reach from a point within a given time, along the real road network. This map draws it for driving, cycling or walking, from 5 to 60 minutes or by distance along the roads, for up to 5 starting points and 4 bands at once, anywhere in the world. Each band carries its area in km². Download the bands as GeoJSON, KML, a zipped Shapefile or a PNG, or copy a link that reopens the same map.

1. Search an address or click the map. The area reachable in 15 minutes by car appears at once.
2. Pick car, bike or walk, a time or a distance, and up to 4 bands. Add up to 5 start points to compare places.
3. Download the bands as GeoJSON, KML, Shapefile or PNG, or copy the link to share the same map.

A circle assumes you can travel in a straight line at the same speed in every direction. Roads do not work that way: a motorway stretches the area along its axis, a river with few bridges cuts it, and a dense centre slows it down. The dashed circle on the map uses an average speed as the crow flies (50 km/h by car, 15 km/h by bike, 5 km/h on foot), so you can see how much of it the roads really reach. In a city it is often less than half.

The areas are computed by Valhalla, an open source routing engine, on our own server, over the OpenStreetMap road network of the whole planet. Speeds come from the road type and the speed limits mapped in OpenStreetMap. Cars keep to roads open to them, bikes avoid motorways and prefer cycle lanes, walkers use footpaths and pedestrian streets. The files you download carry this credit.

© OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), routing by Valhalla on the TerraLab server. OpenStreetMap licence Report a map error

• Up to 60 minutes, or 50 km by car, 30 km by bike and 10 km on foot, with 4 bands and 5 start points per map.
• Speeds are typical free-flow speeds: no live traffic, no rush hour.
• Public transport is not covered: the bike and walk areas use streets and paths only.
• About 30 maps a minute per connection, to keep the server fair for everyone.

An isochrone map shows the area you can reach from a point within a given travel time, for example 15 minutes by car. Its edge links every place that takes the same time to reach. It is used to pick a site for a shop or a clinic, to check which homes are within a 10 minute walk of a school, or to compare commutes.

An isochrone is bounded by a travel time, an isodistance by a distance travelled along the roads. A 10 km isodistance and a 10 minute isochrone can look very different: the isochrone grows along fast roads, while the isodistance only counts kilometres. Pick Time or Distance in the tool to draw one or the other.

The tool walks the road network outward from the start point and adds up the travel time of each road piece from its type and speed limit, until the chosen time runs out. It uses Valhalla, an open source routing engine, on the OpenStreetMap road network, which covers the whole world. The result is a typical trip without live traffic.

Because roads are not straight lines. A motorway lets you go far in one direction, while a river, a mountain or a dense centre holds you back in another. Turn on the comparison circle in the tool to see how much of the circle the roads really reach.

Download the bands from this page as GeoJSON or a zipped Shapefile and drag the file into QGIS. To compute isochrones inside QGIS, the ORS Tools plugin does it with an openrouteservice key, and AI Agent by TerraLab does it when you ask in plain words, for one address or a whole layer of them.