Drive Time Radius??? That's not a thing...but Alteryx can make it one

[Eli_B]

Hi!

I recently had a request from a no nonsense customer who also doesn't take no for an answer. They had requested some map slides showing some locations at a market level and wanted some drive times showing for reference. I completed the request as asked, providing a 15/30/45/60 minute view of drive time polygons all in the same slide using different colors for each.

The doesn't take no customer didn't like it, said the 15 minute drive time was too hard to see at the market level (he wasn't wrong) and decided they would like a drive time radius. I smirked when reading the request..saying to myself that's not a thing. I replied back in a normal GIS/spatial way, explaining that drive times aren't radiuses, they are polygons. His reply..."figure it out". I went to my boss, who understood my dilemma, but basically suggested the same thing, figure it out (this was a customer you don't say no to).

I googled drive time radius but that was no help, a bunch of returns saying drive time radius but showing actual drive times polygons (again I smirked...that's not a radius I thought to myself). So with google being of no help, & not being able to say no, I turned to Alteryx...and figured it out 🙂

This customer was going to come back for a lot more maps, so I knew I had to build something that I could track back to a unique identifier so I could mass produce the slides, and I didn't want to have to do any manual calculations when the markets jumped from NYC to LA for example, as the drive times differ a lot.

Then it hit me, this actually wasn't that hard. I brought in my spatial data & added a Trade Area tool, switching to the drive times, I had it create the ones I needed, which was a 30/45/60 minute drive time per location (the customer dropped the 15 minute request). 

Next, I brought in a Poly-Split tool & split my newly created drive time into points.

I then used the Distance tool to get the miles from my centroid point (my location) and each of the points split from my polygon.

 Now, I just needed to use a Summarize tool to group by my unique identifier, also grouping on the original radius size, then getting the average for my DistanceMiles. I also included my original centroid for downstream use.

I added a Select tool to change the Avg_DistanceMiles column to an integer, then I added another Summarize tool, this time grouping on my unique identifier & doing a concatenate on the Avg_DistanceMiles (creating the format needed to pass into a new Trade Area tool, along with the centroid I kept).

Last, I just brought in another Trade Area tool, this time instead of naming the size I wanted, I pointed it to my Concat_Avg_DistanceMiles column (this makes each radius size unique to the location).

I did some manual testing of the results, comparing the distance shown in the new radius to some google direction drive times & was surprised to see that this was not as inaccurate as I was thinking it was going to be. I presented the new slides to the customer & he loved them. 

So in 8 tools (9 including Input), Alteryx created a "ballpark" accurate real drive time radius that can be used to produce bulk results specific to the individual location. This allows the user to still use drive time estimates in a much more friendly market level radius view. Not bad Alteryx...not bad 🙂

[Emil_Kos]

Hi @Eli_B,

I don't have much experience with spatial tools but I am happy Alteryx solved your problem and your customer will be happy 😀

Good for you 😁