Walking is the most natural mode of transportation. It is available everywhere and is usually the first and last part of a journey, whether long or short. We have developed an area-based approach for computing the paths and reachability for pedestrians, calculated to an accuracy of just a few meters.
We use heterogeneous data sources and can even model desire paths which are not explicitly mapped in the base data. In particular, we do not rely on a consistent routing network.
4. What are isochrones?
A walktime isochrone …
... shows the precise walking time of your neighborhood
for any starting point
... contains thousands of individual paths. We compute
these paths in less than a second;
… is the building block for our reachability analysis.
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6. Why do you need Walkalytics?
Benchmark your
quality of service (QoS)
Optimize your
services and resources
Establish and maintain
customer relationships
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10. Optimal siting of your new service point:
Service areas with high population or demographic group density
10
Workforce reachable within 5 minutes
11. Optimal siting of your new service point:
Service areas with high population or demographic group density
11
Residential population reachable within 5 minutes
12. Optimal target audience for your marketing
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Ex. of an origin-destination matrix
24’000 Swiss public transport stops
2’000’000 households
Result: Walking times and paths
between public transport infrastruc-
ture and households
Benefits:
cost savings in mass-mailings
target the audience who lives
within 5 minutes walking time
to your point-of-sales
13. Geofencing
As a coffee-shop, please send alert if a customer is within 5 minutes
walking distance to indicate / notify them a special deal.
As a passenger, alert me if a delay happens at a nearby public
transportation
1313
Customer relationship
14. What data do you need?
Use any available basemap data or combination of them
Add your own data (e.g. a planned bridge, underpass, etc.)
For quality of public transportation service, use GTFS
(GeneralTransit Feed Specification), a common format for
transit schedules
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OpenStreetMap
National mapping
data
TomTom or
NavTeq data Cadastre data
20. Our services
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API web service
(Python, ArcGIS Desktop/Javascript API,
OpenLayers, Leaflet)
Consulting and
processing of your own data
Swiss approach for public
transportation QoS (GTFS)
21. Our contact details
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Juerg Elsener
Ernst Basler + Partner
Hong Kong Ltd.
51/F Hopewell Centre
183 Queen's Road East
Wanchai
Hong Kong
香港灣仔皇后大道東183號
合和中心51樓
juerg.elsener@ebp.hk
Dr. Ivo Leiss
Ernst Basler + Partner
Switzerland
Mühlebachstrasse 11
8032 Zürich
ivo.leiss@ebp.ch
www.walkalytics.com/en/
Planners also use the term «accessibility» instead of «reachability».
Reachability analysis is obviously useful for shopping areas analysis (top left), but also for maintenance works planning (top right) or service point design (bottom right).
Would you install a service point in the middle of desert (bottom right)?
First we would like to introduce the concept of (precise) isochrones.
We start our walk anywhere at any point of a map (Europe, USA, … anywhere where we have street map data)
At the starting point, we simultaneously send thousands of virtual pedestrians to any direction. Along their paths, they measure their walking time and their positions.
In the end, the walking time is color-coded on the map.
The definition of walking time obviously depends on the subject: Younger women, older men, people with disabilities, etc. It is possible to precisely model the walking time based on customers’ rules for the the underlying topography and the elevation of the neighborhood.
Our service can solve a range of customer problems, three of them are outlined below:
Quality of Service Coverage for Public TransportationFor assessing the coverage quality of your public transportation network, it is important to have accurate data on passenger walking distances to and from the nearest station. An additional factor is whether the closest station is a high-frequency train-station or a low-frequency bus stop. Based on up to tens of thousands of public transport stations, we calculate high-resolution quality grade zones based on the proximity and frequency of public transport stops.
Real Estate RatingAs a real-estate professional you know that the top three priority items in your business are: location, location, location. A large element of the location’s value is the proximity of local services such as shops, schools, recreation areas, services and public transport. With our walk-time analysis and grading, we can provide up-to-date and accurate indicators for the accessibility of local services. Do you manage millions of properties? No problem! We’ll take care of it thanks to our scalable computation infrastructure.
Accurate Nearby SearchesUsually, the proximity of these points of interest is based on a simple circle around your current position. With Walkalytics, you are only shown amenities that are genuinely within walking distance – not across the river, on the other side of the highway or blocked by other obstacles.
Up to now, the local governments only roughly estimate the quality of service by drawing circles around transportation stops (see image).
Using the Walkalytics approach (see image), the QoS map becomes much more accurate.
Compared to the traditional approach, we can show that up to 46% of the buildings in a Swiss city are currently misclassified.
Detail of the Swiss approach for public transportation QoS (using GTFS).
Example: City of Geneva.
Red and yellow: areas which have a high potential of customers within 5 minutes walking distance
Example: City of Geneva.
Red and yellow: areas which have a high potential of customers within 5 minutes walking distance
What are some of the advantages of our approach to computing isochrones for your business or agency?
Worldwide coverage, offering a homogeneous result for everywhere.
Very detailed results: With one computation, we can show the area that is accessible from any given point within any given timespan, not only for few discrete time steps.
We don’t need routing-capable data, we just model every patch of your neighborhood based on its walkability.
We can easily combine multiple data sources to model the walkability, like national mapping data, cadastral or surveying data, municipal data, and e.g. OpenStreetMap. Combining data sources for best coverage is easy. This flexibility of adopting to, and using, different data sources has proven tremendously helpful in recent projects.
It’s fast, especially considering the information value of the result: Computing one isochrone at 5 meters resolution with an upper limit of 20 minutes of walking, we analyse literally thousands of individual paths and get hundreds of thousands of walking time measurements as a result. And all this information still can be computed in much less than a second on an ordinary laptop.