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RangeFinda Application
Create drive-time maps about chosen locations such as retail outlets.
Drive-Time Analysis and Mapping about Given Locations
The RangeFinda application lets you compute how far you can travel by all routes by road about one or more chosen locations. It represents off-peak, drive-times by road as isochrone maps or by using colours to highlight how far you can travel for chosen intervals, such as 3, 6 , 9, etc. minutes. It lets you determine how far you can drive using average speeds for each seqment or class of road (motorway, A, B,C, D...etc. class roads). It finds all routes which are portrayed on the chosen type and scale of digital vector road map in all directions about one or more starting locations.
For example, if you choose a rural village and run the RangeFinda application, you can view and interpret a map showing that you can travel similar distances along all of the available country roads in a chosen time. If however you are in an area where there are urban streets, arterial roads and motorways, you will typically be able to travel much further along the arterial roads and motorways in a given time than within city streets as illustrated in the map of drive-times from the centre of Edinburgh.
The RangeFinda application offers significant benefits for assessing the accessibility of a given location or set of locations. The accessibility can be assessed for one or more chosen locations for new outlets such as shopping centres, retail outlets, garages, schools or hospitals. It reveals quickly and efficiently the off-peak, drive-times from residential areas to an outlet. Another benefit is that RangeFinda works equally well for studying travel times for pedestrians, cyclists, buses or trains. Where you have multiple outlets within a given suburban area, the RangeFinda output reveals the relative accessibility and drive-times for each outlet. The results can inform decision-making and provide significant benefits for planning, location of schools, hospitals, dentists, health centres, market research and siting of new retail outlets. When studied alongs with data about the population catchment area for a given location and models and empirical data about how far or for how long people are willing to travel to a supermarket, car dealer, cinema or furniture shop, the RangeFinda application provides valuable insights into the relative attractiveness and accessibility of different locations. Graticule offers a service to create RangeFinda output maps for chosen locations and scenarios to assist planners. Please give us a call to discuss your requirements.
Benefits for Business
The RangeFinda application offers a flexible, fast and effective solution to a generic problem in business planning, logistics, routing and scheduling. It provides a measure of the accessibility by road of one or more given locations such as a city, town, shopping centre, retail outlet, wholesale depot, school, church, hospital, library, medical practice, dental practice, sports facility or emergency service such as fire station, police station or ambulance depot. Off-peak drive-times and routes reveal spatial relationships about drive-times and distances by road about a given location, can aid contingency and service planning and provision and can reveal new insights about traffic flows, driver behaviour and preferences. As accessibility is often an important surrogate measure of attractiveness of a site in locating businesses and organisations, the RangeFinda application provides valuable information which is not readily available from other sources.
The RangeFinda application offers a neat business planning solution where a business manager wants to provide geographical coverage over a region or town for the convenience of customers or patients. By using multiple starting points, the RangeFinda application can show the geographical coverage, overlaps and gaps in coverage and ways of effectively avoiding or filling these. The classic example is planning milk delivery rounds from a single or multiple dairies or depots. Each milkman can only travel a set distance each day in an electric vehicle, the speed of travel of which is limited to a specific range. The issue is how to provide full geographical coverage with the minimal number of milk floats from a given set of dairies or depots. The RangeFinda application with a given set of large-scale vector street data provides a neat and effective solution on a computer display. But it can also provide solutions with medium or small-scale vector road data for other appications extending over cities, countries or continents. And it is being used to determine geographical areas for business franchises, commercial travellers, regional representatives and other business functions.
Examples of output from RangeFinda are available as colour isochrone maps showing how far a driver can travel in set intervals such as 2,4,6,8 minutes about a point. Please get in touch if you would like to use our custom service or licence the software application.