Transport Analysis at scale
A whole school catchment analysed in a couple of hours
Change a road or school access point, and the shortest walking routes recalculate across the catchment.
- Client context
- Transport planning team
- Built with
- Rhino, Grasshopper, GIS data
What changed
An assessment that took three or four days now takes a couple of hours. The team also keeps a live model for testing road closures, new connections and changes to the school access points.
The problem
Traffic teams assessing a school need to know how long students across a whole catchment take to walk in, and how that changes when a road closes, a new road opens, or the school moves an exit. It sounds simple until you try to do it at scale. The team's existing method handled one address at a time in an online map: enter it, adjust the route to model the change, record the result, then move to the next. A whole catchment meant hundreds of lookups and three or four days of work. A second scenario meant repeating the exercise.
What I built
The team works in a region with published government spatial data, so I built a map downloader around that source. They browse to the study area, display the lots and roads, then download the data they need.
From there, the workflow calculates the shortest walking route from each home to the school and classifies the catchment by walking time. The user runs the assessment from a single control without working through each address separately.