How to visualize two areas with isochrones?

Hi there!
Total noob here, asking for a friend, so please be gentle :slight_smile:

How can you define two areas and their respective isochrones?
The goal is to show address A of e.g. a super market has a commute area of (car; driving) 10 Minutes and another super market at address B also has a commute area of 10 minutes.

This should show then (if any) their overlap.

I’m really puzzled as to how to move on in openrouteservice to get this done - many thanks in advance, any help is greatly appreciated.!

Best
Wee

Hi @wee, with the isochrones API you can pass in multiple locations into the locations parameter and then if you set the parameter intersections=true, the response will contain polygons that represent the overlaps as well as the original isochrones.

So passing something like https://api.openrouteservice.org/isochrones?api_key=...&locations=8.34234,48.23424|8.36234,48.13424&profile=driving-car&range=900&intersections=true you would end up with two Polygons in the response (the isochrones for each point) and one MultiPoygon which represents the overlaps.

Hi @adam, many thanks for your feedback!
Unfortunately using an API is wayyyy beyond my/our capabilities (I understand their benefit and in general how they work, but I can’t apply this to any real life benefit…).

Is there any way to achieve this in the GUI of https://maps.openrouteservice.org ?

Best
Wee

You can generate multiple isochrones on the gui by choosing a centre, changing parameters, and then clicking on “Generate Isochrones” and then repeat the process of other centre locations. You can then play around by visually identifying overlaps, but there is currently no way of automatically generating these overlaps on the gui.

1 Like

Many thanks @adam for taking the time, I appreciate it ! I’ll forward this and hope it’s the solution :slight_smile:

Best
Wee

I have been experiencing some issues with the multipolygon. While isochrones are located in Boston, the returned multipolygon in teh API test map is returned in the Atlantic close to Africa. Also, is there a way to get the area in km2 and population of the intersecting multipolygon?

We will deprecate the intersection parameter with the next major release in Januar/February. This kind of calculation doesn’t belong on a backend but to the frontend/client-side (turf.js, shapely, QGIS geoprocessing etc.)