RadiusMapperIsochrone map generator
Isochrone Map Generator
Draw travel-time polygons by car, foot, or bike
Generate isochrone maps for any address. The polygon follows real highways, one-way streets, and bike lanes, which is why a 15-minute drive from Times Square stretches up the FDR but barely makes it across 34th Street at 5pm. Free to use, no account required.
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What's 15 minutes from you?
Change the address, mode, or minutes. The travel-time polygon redraws in seconds.
Generate an isochrone
Interactive isochrone map
What is an isochrone map?
An isochrone map is a polygon that shows every point reachable within a specific travel time from a single origin. A 15-minute driving isochrone outlines everywhere you can drive to in 15 minutes from a chosen address.
The key difference from a radius circle: a circle assumes equal travel in every direction, but real travel bends around rivers, highways, one-way streets, and traffic. An isochrone is calculated on the actual road and path network, so its shape follows real movement.
Isochrone maps have been around since 19th-century urban planning. Francis Galton published one of the earliest in 1881, showing travel times from London to the rest of the world. Today they power work in real estate, retail site selection, delivery planning, urban planning, emergency response, and academic research.
How RadiusMapper's isochrone generator works
Enter any location
Type an address, a landmark ("Fenway Park"), or a ZIP, or drop a pin on the map. The isochrone generator geocodes worldwide and snaps your origin to the nearest edge on OpenStreetMap's road graph. That matters if you pin a building set back from the street.
Pick mode + time
Driving, walking, or cycling. Minutes from 5 to 120. Run it three times at 10, 20, 30 minutes to see how much the polygon grows past the first congestion ring. In Manhattan that growth is tiny. In Phoenix it doubles.
Get the polygon
Polygon renders in roughly 1–2 seconds with live traffic where available. Copy the share link, paste an iframe into a listing page, or export GeoJSON and open it in QGIS, Felt, or Mapbox Studio the same way you'd open any other polygon layer.
Isochrone map use cases
Real-estate commute isochrones
Redfin and Zillow both ship some form of commute filter, but neither shows you the full polygon. An isochrone map does. For a San Francisco buyer looking 30 minutes from SoMA, the reachable band on Caltrain stretches to Millbrae while the drive isochrone stops dead at the Bay Bridge onramp.
Retail site selection & isochrone catchment
Chipotle underwrites urban stores on a 10-minute walk isochrone; suburban stores get a 10-minute drive. Same brand, same target, wildly different polygon. Layer an isochrone catchment over Census block-group demographics before signing a 10-year lease and you're underwriting the actual addressable market, not a 3-mile circle that half-lands in a reservoir.
Delivery and service-area isochrones
Domino's 30-minute guarantee was killed in the US in 1993 after a fatal driver accident, but the operational idea stuck: every Domino's store still runs a drive-time isochrone instead of a postcode list. Jimmy John's cuts it tighter at five minutes. An isochrone draws those promise times as actual polygons instead of zip-code approximations that bleed across natural barriers.
Urban planning & the 15-minute city isochrone
Paris ran Carlos Moreno's 15-minute-city framework into its 2020 municipal plan, and the audit tool was a walking isochrone from every residential block. Melbourne has been doing 20-minute-neighborhood work the same way since 2017. The isochrone map is the evidence base. It's what converts a talking point into a defendable sidewalk, crosswalk, or zoning map.
Emergency services isochrone coverage
NFPA 1710 sets 4 minutes travel for the first engine and 8 minutes for a full alarm assignment. Fire chiefs pull 4- and 8-minute driving isochrones from each station to find the gaps: the exact blocks that trigger a new station, a mutual-aid agreement, or a repositioned ambulance. The polygon makes the gap visible. A radius circle hides it behind a highway that ladder truck can't actually use.
Transit accessibility isochrone research
A 30-minute transit isochrone from a Bronx subway stop covers about 1/8th the land area of the same 30 minutes from a Brooklyn stop. That's the Bronx-to-Manhattan commute penalty in one polygon. MIT's Transit Center and NYU's Rudin Center have both published peer-reviewed access-to-jobs work on exactly this kind of isochrone comparison.
Isochrone vs. radius
Put a 3-mile radius circle around a store in San Francisco's Marina and it lands half in the Bay. An isochrone of the same 15-minute drive hugs Lombard, skips over the water, and stops where the Presidio's grades kill your speed. That's the whole difference.
Radius circle
A straight-line buffer drawn at a fixed distance from the origin.
- Pretends the world is a flat plain: no rivers, no highways, no grid
- Overcounts across freeways and undercounts along them (a 3-mile circle in Manhattan covers wildly more land than you can reach in the time it takes to drive 3 miles there)
- Fast to compute, which is why MLS sites, lending radius rules, and franchise territory docs still use them
- Fine as a proximity filter. Bad as a market sizing tool.
Isochrone polygon
A travel-time boundary computed on the real road, path, or transit network.
- Routed on the actual street graph: OpenStreetMap, bridges, freeways, and all
- Reflects posted limits, signal density, and live traffic where available (rush-hour Manhattan isochrones look nothing like 3am ones)
- Stretches finger-like along I-95, contracts inside a dense downtown grid. The shape tells you where the street network is doing the work
- An Esri Business Analyst study put the drive-time isochrone at roughly 2.5× more accurate than an equivalent-distance circle for retail catchment estimation
Who builds on isochrone analysis
Real estate
Commute reality, walk score backup, and listing differentiation. Every isochrone is a visual commute promise.
Business planning
Trade areas, catchment, and site selection modeled on real travel time rather than straight-line circles.
Urban planning
15-minute-city audits, transit accessibility studies, and equity analysis grounded in block-level reach.
Retail
Catchment polygons, competitor overlap, and gap analysis for new stores and franchise expansion.
Service coverage
Delivery zones, field-service boundaries, and response-time standards for emergency operations.
Location intelligence teams
Isochrone analysis is the backbone of our location intelligence platform. Same polygon engine, plus demographics, competitor data, and saved maps.
Developers
Isochrone map for developers
Every isochrone on this page is also available through a clean, documented REST endpoint. The Developer API returns a valid GeoJSON Feature with the travel-time polygon geometry, ready to drop into Mapbox GL, Leaflet, QGIS, or any downstream pipeline.
No credit card to try it, generous free tier, and the same road-network and traffic data that power the browser tool. Rate limits, authentication, and batch isochrone generation are covered in the developer documentation.
Isochrone map examples across cities
Pre-built 15-minute driving isochrones for the world's most-mapped cities. Every page uses the same generator you just tried.
Related isochrone tools
Isochrone analysis guides & products
Trade area analysis
RadiusMapper's trade-area tool is built directly on isochrone mapping. Draw custom travel-time catchments and layer demographic overlays on top for every candidate site.
Explore trade areaSite selection
Rank candidate locations by isochrone-based catchment, competitor overlap, and addressable market. The same polygon engine, deployed for retail expansion.
Explore site selectionThe 15-minute city & walkability
How isochrone mapping powers 15-minute-city audits, and what a walking isochrone actually tells you about urban access.
Read the guideTravel-time calculator: how far can you really go?
Why travel-time polygons beat distance circles, and how to read an isochrone like a local planner does.
Read the guideIsochrone map FAQs
What is an isochrone map?
An isochrone map is a travel-time polygon that outlines every point reachable within an equal amount of time from a chosen origin. Instead of a circle drawn at fixed distance, it follows the real road, path, and transit network. A 15-minute driving isochrone stretches far along a freeway and shrinks in dense, signal-heavy streets.
How is an isochrone different from a buffer or radius?
A buffer or radius is a straight-line circle drawn at a fixed distance. It ignores rivers, highways, and street layout. An isochrone is computed on the actual road network, so it reflects where you can truly reach by car, foot, or bike in a given time. For any decision where real road access matters, isochrones are a better fit than radius circles.
How accurate are RadiusMapper's isochrones?
RadiusMapper's isochrone generator uses live road-network graphs, posted speed limits, mode-specific speeds, and live traffic where available. Polygons match observed commute patterns closely and update as traffic conditions shift.
Can I use isochrones for my business?
Yes. Retailers use isochrones to model catchment, delivery teams to define service zones, real-estate agents to show commute reality, and urban planners to test 15-minute-city goals. Commercial use is allowed on the free tool; the Developer API and RadiusMapper Pro add higher rate limits and demographic overlays.
Are isochrones free to generate?
Yes. RadiusMapper's isochrone map generator is free, instant, and requires no signup. Draw, share, embed, and export travel-time polygons without creating an account.
What's the largest isochrone you can create?
Isochrones scale from 5 minutes up to 2 hours, covering everything from a walking errand radius to a regional driving catchment. The Developer API supports extended ranges and batch jobs.
Can I export or embed an isochrone?
Yes. Every isochrone has a permanent share link, an embeddable iframe, and a GeoJSON export that drops straight into QGIS, Mapbox, Felt, or any GIS pipeline. The Developer API returns GeoJSON directly.
What's an isochrone generator?
An isochrone generator turns an origin, a travel mode, and a time limit into a polygon. RadiusMapper's runs in your browser. Pick a point, choose driving, walking, or cycling, enter minutes, and the polygon renders instantly.
How long does it take to generate?
Most isochrones render in under two seconds. Larger polygons take a few seconds more, then cache for instant re-share and re-embed.
See who lives in your area
Layer population, income & housing data on any travel-time map. Free to start.