Isochrones

Are not cold old people….

Sorry bad joke and only one that works for native English speakers.

So turning to Wikipedia to get a definition we can see that the term isochrone referring to contour lines of equal time, for instance, in geological layers, tree rings or wave fronts.

This is an interesting concept that can be applied to displaying travel time from a certain geographical place to another by using contour bands of differing time. From what I understand of the concept the computing process on the fly is very labour intensive and hence any maps produced are produced with a known and controlled data set.

But the display of travel times becomes in my opinion very intuitive, and one can easily display the difference between taking the train or taking the car. The not for profit organisation called mysociety has done several projects where they have produced maps that indicate just this very comparison.

Here the map assumes that we are starting in Cambridge and shows parts of the UK which are easier and quicker to get to by train are coloured red and orange and those that are easier to get to by car are indicated by green and blue, yellow and light orange show where there is no huge difference at all.

A useful map showing drivers that it may be better to take the train after all.

Another use for these maps has been to produce travel times against another metric, for example house prices, maps on the mysociety page show travel times against house prices in London for working at the Department for Transport. The map then has adjustable sliders so that users can input their own constraints.

Hence users can see literally how far their money will go.

“I want to live 30 minutes away from work and I only have £200,000 to spend then I can live in X,Y and Z”

Actually the disappointing news is that £200,000 won’t allow you to live within 30 minutes of the DFT in London!

Have a play yourself its absorbing stuff.

On their website it states that mysociety wish to expand the concept to include travel costs, but its is obvious that carbon could be the second metric or in fact any other travel related item. The mysociety page also describes that the main issue is getting access to the data sets to support the development of the maps.

Therefore I would encourage companies and organisations working in the travel field to consider ways that such an intuitive method to display travel data could help us improve multimodal up take and get involved in the project.

Mysociety do also say that they are looking for ways to offer real time maps on the web but having this power in your hand in an i-Travel device would be an excellent way to display travel choices, bike V car, car V public transport etc, maybe we need to wait for computing power to catch up first, but getting companies like this invoved in European transport research projects seems a must.