Overview

Understanding how many people can reach a location within a specific travel time is central to multiple workflows. Whether you’re defining retail trade areas, franchise territory boundaries, or balancing sales territories, PopEx lets you model population accessibility using drive-time isochrones — dynamic shapes that represent areas reachable within a given time by road.

Traditional circular buffers measure population within a fixed radius, but drive-time isochrones incorporate the actual road network and travel speeds via PopEx’s integration with the Mapbox Isochrone API. This makes them a more realistic representation of reach and service potential — crucial when analyzing urban congestion, infrastructure gaps, or rural travel times.

When you create a drive-time isochrone in PopEx, the system automatically intersects that travel-time polygon with the selected population dataset (LandScan or WorldPop) and returns population totals, densities, and income results directly in the item summary panel. You can also overlay Points of Interest (POIs) to understand how competitors, amenities, or facilities are distributed within your reachable area.

This combination of accessibility and demographic context turns each isochrone into a decision-making tool — a way to quantify who can reach your site, how long it takes, and what the economic potential looks like inside that zone.

Follow the steps below, or watch a quick how-to video on isochrones!

Steps

1. Create a Folder and Generate an Isochrone
   All PopEx shapes live in folders. In the left drawer, click New → Create Folder, then New → Create Item → Isochrone. Select a point on the map (such as a store, tower, or aid center). Choose your travel mode (Driving, Walking, Cycling) and time range (e.g., 10, 15, or 30 minutes). Click Add to generate the isochrone polygon.

2. View Population Results
   PopEx immediately calculates total population, density, and income within the generated isochrone. Click the item name in your folder to open the summary panel, where these ASB values are displayed.

3. Add POI Context
   Search for Google POIs using the map search bar to visualize nearby businesses, amenities, or competitors within the same travel-time zone. Use this overlay to understand commercial saturation or service coverage.

4. Export Results
   Click Export → Excel to download population summaries, or Export → KML to use the isochrone in external mapping tools.

Verification

Confirm that your isochrone matches the expected reach based on local travel conditions — dense city centers may show smaller shapes than rural areas for the same time value. To validate population totals, generate multiple isochrones (e.g., 10-, 20-, and 30-minute) and check that the captured population scales logically between them. If POIs appear outside the expected boundary, confirm the correct layer is active in Layers → Settings.

Further reading

• Calculate Population in a City — compare isochrone-based and boundary-based analysis.

• Learn more about our data

Need More Help?

If you run into issues, please contact us.