Coming Up in VFX 5.5: Drive-Time!

In conjunction with the forthcoming version 5.5 of Visual Fusion, IDV Solutions will offer a drive-time service.  The service is hosted in Microsoft's Azure, and, given a starting location and time increments will provide geographic areas within reach.  As this service gets it's face within VFX, we've gone through a few rounds of design and simplification to offer a tool that is flexible and simple to use.  Here are some screenshots...

You can set several drive-time rings by dropping them in along the time range.  Existing drive-time durations can be easily drug about or removed.  You can drop in a bunch of rings and choose to evenly space them as well.  A traffic multiplier manipulates the underlying posted speed limits of the road network to offset the actual area the one might cover in variable conditions.

Here are 5, 20, and 45-minute drive-time areas from downtown Carson City, near Lake Tahoe.  It's interesting to see the drive-time warp around less accessible mountainous areas and inaccessible bodies of water.

Here are ten drive-time rings radiating out from Garden Grove, CA, where the dense road network of greater LA provides pretty consistent coverage in all directions.

My commutable area.  I live at the origin pin and IDV lives at the southern edge of the 20-minute drive-time area.  Right on.

Driving in the Columbia River Gorge is an exercise in cliff-hugging.  Here is the zone of possibility for a five-minute drive.  I recommend all of it.

There is one way in and one way out when driving in the Florida Keys.  Starting in Key West, the drive-time areas represent well the linear nature of island hopping.

Similarly to the Florida Keys, driving options are relatively limited in the Plaquemines parish of Louisiana.  Here is a one-hour drive-time of ten evenly distributed 6-minute rings.

 Here are those same drive-time rings moved over to downtown Seattle.  The coverage is a much different dispersion than we found in the Mississippi delta in the previous image.

 Finally, a one-hour drive-time area from the entrance of Great Smokey Mountains National Park.  An application like this reverses the mental notion of a starting point and a cover-able area to a notion of where is my one-hour market?