RE: [Maptitude] Driving times layer

[Richard Hoskins]

It depends on what you need the distances for. If you need real drive times, for sure TransCad is what you need and it is a very nice product. As an epidemiologist I did not really see too much use for working with transportation issues – I was wrong. We have all kinds of things coming out where we are looking at “walkability” of cities, driving times to care centers. Actually I have been working with driving distances. Just recently got the NorTech (sp) street file which has traffic flow and speed limits, etc. Not clear just yet how to hook that to TransCad (I am still a low level user)   However ….  Calculating crow fly distances is not too bad (depends what you are needing)   I have done a study that looks at the actual driving distances and the great circle distance. The are different but depending on the scale of your problem, not all that different. Most importantly, ranking the distances (say 1000 patients going to 10 clinics) with TransCad and then comparing them with great circles distances pretty much maintains the ranking. This is one study and not really verified. Of course the big disadvantage is that you have no idea about 1 way streets, and many other factors that can impact the actual drive time. However if you really need info like this a lot then TransCad is the way to go. One of the ideas I am working on now is to use TransCad to simulate patient access to care. TC has some powerful modeling tools, but at this point I really have no idea what I am doing …!   Dick Hoskins   From: Larry Manire [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 9:14 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [Maptitude] Driving times layer   >I happen to give GeoVue a look today and noticed it will do a map >showing different driving times from a location >http://www.geovue.com/samples/dritim.htm >Is there a way to add a layer like that with Maptitude? No.  You must use Calipers's TransCAD product for that.  If you use shortest paths, drive time polygons or other transportation based functions I suggest you take a look at it.  It is an awesome product.  (Maptitude is just a subset of TransCAD.) At geoVue we use Freeway called from the GISDK to create drive time polygons from within Maptitude so we can have a less expensive, Maptitude based product.  See http://www.spatialinsights.com/catalog/product.aspx?product=37 for freeway. We also use TransCAD, especially the facility location functionality, for our market planning products. Warning, shameless product promotion coming up: If you do a lot with national demographics, and define the areas on which to compute demographics in many different ways including drive times, you may want to take a serious look at iSite (from geoVue).  Of course, if you do site selection, sales forecasting and market planning you definitely should use it!  Full disclosure: I wrote most of it!  (Armando Scalise, also a member of this group, wrote the rest.) Larry Manire Senior Software Engineer, geoVue (I am the Maptitude/TransCAD GISDK programmer at geoVue.) Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ADVERTISEMENT Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Maptitude/   To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.