This week, across England, Scotland and Ireland, the Transport Planning Society hosts its TPS International Quiz. We decided to use Podaris to explore accessibility to its ten locations, using census data to perform isochrone analysis and find out how many people can travel to each location within 30 minutes, by bike.
The first step is to plot the locations. Podaris allows us to jump to the lat/long coordinates of each location and create a point to mark them on a dataset layer. Styling for dataset points, lines and polygons in Podaris is extensive. We've used single points here but we can also use icons, draw polygons to match the building's footprint or colour-code our points and polygons by value (perhaps in relation to the capacity of the venue).
Next we import census data for the wider area around each location and use the dataset's population attribute to construct an isochrone query. Clicking the ‘isochrone’ tool brings up the isochrone tool panel and allows us to:
- Set the isochrone kind to ‘travel-time’
- Set its type to ‘to’ our location (represented by the point location specified in our first dataset layer)
- Set its mode to ‘cycle’
- Set three 10 minute steps
The queries tab also lets us specify which attribute from our census data we'll be using in our calculations (the population attribute). And that's it. We can now see how many people can travel to the quiz by bicycle in 30 minutes.
We're using Podaris’ street based isochrones in this example to give us a truer picture of how travelers may use existing streets to reach these locations. This kind of isochrone analysis can be performed in seconds, and when combined with Podaris’ query editor can be used to perform highly sophisticated analyses in minutes.
In just a few clicks, we were able to find out which city was the most accessible to the most number of people! London might need to book a bigger pub…
Best of luck to everyone entering tomorrow's quiz - we look forward to joining you for future quizzes. For a complete tour of all of Podaris’ functionality, get in touch to schedule a demo today!