The World Driving Times Map

Last year Empty Pipes made a series of beautiful looking isochrone maps showing public transit travel times from major European cities. Now Empty Pipes is back with Isochrone Driving Maps of the World.

Using OpenStreetMap mapping data and the Graphopper open source routing library Empty Pipes has created a series of maps for towns and cites around the world. The map visualize the driving times when starting from the center of each of the mapped cities.

Empty Pipes also makes a number of interesting observations based on his ischrone maps of driving times. For example he notices how many of the driving time maps for cities in the US have a distinctive pyramid shape. One result of the grid patterns of many American cities is that it takes much longer to drive 'along the diagonal than to travel straight north and south'.

Elsewhere geographical features can be seen to have a huge impact on driving times. For example in Santiago, Chile the Andes mountains have a clear impact on anyone driving east of the city.