A Jupyter notebook showing how to use free spatial APIs to create isochrone maps.

I made this for a training session at City Bureau's inaugural Design-A-Thon.

You can view slides for the training here.

• pipenv

pipenv --three
pipenv install

pipenv shell
jupyter-notebook Isochrones\ with\ Python\ and\ APIs.ipynb

If you just want to geocode one address really quickly, the U.S. Census Bureau Geocoder has a web form. They have another form that lets you geocode all addresses in a CSV file.

There's also an API that lets you geocode individual addresses, or a batch of addresses as CSV.

This API is free to use, but only works for U.S. addresses.

It also seems to be broken right now.

If you just want to geocode one address, there is an interactive geocoder.

Developer's Guide

Pros:

• Supports transit

Cons:

• Can only be used to display information on a Google Map
• Have to make multiple queries to query distances along a radius to build isocrhone

Quick Start Guide API Reference

Pros:

• API returns the isochrone itself

Cons:

• Only supports car and pedestrian modes of transport

API Documentation

Pros:

• More permissive uses than Google's API

Cons:

• Have to make multiple queries to query distances along a radius to build isocrhone
• Doesn't support transit

Service description

API documentation

Pros:

• More permissive uses than Google's API
• Supports Driving, Cycling, Walking and Transit
• Response is GeoJSON

Cons:

• Doesn't incorporate traffic in driving times
• Doesn't (yet) support arrival time for transit directions

To Sahil Chinoy who made these awesome isochrones of leaving metro areas for the weekend and told me about the HERE API.