Travel isochrones

The Travel isochrones tool generates polygons that represent the area reachable from each input point within a specified time or distance budget.

You can provide input points in two ways:

• Upload CSV (existing workflow)
• Find POIs from OpenStreetMap (optional alternative)

What you’ll need

• An Azure Maps API key (subscription key)
• Your input points (CSV or OSM)

Input mode: Upload CSV

1. Open Tools → Travel isochrones
2. Choose Upload CSV
3. Upload or drag-and-drop your CSV
4. Map your Latitude and Longitude columns

The tool preserves all original columns and adds one WKT polygon column per requested isochrone.

Input mode: Find POIs from OpenStreetMap

Use this when you don’t have a point dataset yet and want to generate isochrones around common POIs (e.g. supermarkets, hospitals).

Steps

1. Choose Find POIs from OpenStreetMap
2. Search for an area (Nominatim autocomplete) and select a relation (administrative boundary) result
3. Choose a POI type
4. Click Fetch POIs

Notes & limits

• Default max results is 5,000 POIs (you can change this in Advanced filters).
• Overpass can be busy. If a request times out (504), try again or choose a smaller area / narrower POI type.
• If Nominatim search is blocked in your environment, you can paste an OSM relation id and the tool will use it directly.

After POIs are fetched, the tool treats them like an uploaded point dataset (lat/lon + properties) and you can proceed to generation.

Settings

Range type

• Time (seconds)
• Time (minutes) (converted internally to seconds for API calls)
• Distance (meters)

Isochrones (1–5)

You can request between 1 and 5 budgets per point. Each budget generates a separate polygon.

Output columns are created as:

• isochrone_wkt_300s / isochrone_wkt_5min / isochrone_wkt_5000m (depending on range type and values)

Travel mode

Travel mode controls the routing profile (e.g. car vs pedestrian). For ruck, you can provide optional vehicle constraints.

Route optimisation

Controls routing behaviour for the isochrones.

Traffic (Optional)

Traffic modelling is only available for motorised travel modes. If enabled, you can optionally supply a departure time (RFC3339 format).

Avoid (Optional)

Exclude route features such as toll roads, motorways, ferries, unpaved roads, and carpools.

Truck constraints (Optional)

When using ruck travel mode, you can provide vehicle dimensions/weights and hazardous materials.

Outputs

CSV (WKT polygons)

• Output is a CSV download.
• All original columns are preserved.
• One additional WKT column is added per requested budget.
• Existing WKT columns are reused when present; already-filled cells are skipped.

PMTiles (Optional)

You can also output a PMTiles file (vector tiles) generated in-browser using GDAL WASM (gdal3.js).

Attribution / licensing (PMTiles export)

The PMTiles export uses:

• gdal3.js (license: LGPL-2.1-or-later) – see project site and source repo
• LGPL license text: GNU LGPL

PMTiles zoom (Optional)

• Min zoom: start generating/showing tiles at this zoom level (higher can reduce file size).
• Max zoom: generate detail up to this zoom (higher increases file size and build time).

Security note