Skip to main content

How to create a Travel Time Matrix in ArcGIS

Tutorial on how to calculate the travel times between thousands of locations in ArcGIS Pro.

A travel time matrix gives the journey time between many origins and many destinations in one run. It’s far more useful than a distance matrix when what matters is how long people take to get somewhere. Common uses:

  • Seeing how an office move would change employees’ commute times

  • Allocating clients to sales reps or engineers to keep travel time down

  • Sending people to their nearest store, facility or centre, measured in time rather than distance

In this example we have two point layers across the San Francisco Bay Area: the home locations of 500 employees, and 10 office locations. We want each employee’s driving commute to each office, arriving for 8:30am, to see which offices keep commutes shortest.

500 employee home locations (purple) and 10 offices (green) across the San Francisco Bay Area

1. Open the tool

In the Catalog pane, open the TravelTime toolbox and double-click Travel Time Matrix Custom in the Custom toolset. (Can’t see the toolbox? See How do I open the TravelTime toolbox in ArcGIS Pro?)

Travel Time Matrix Custom in the Custom toolset of the TravelTime toolbox

2. Set up the search

Travel Time Matrix Custom set up from Employees to Offices by driving, arriving at 8:30am US/Pacific, with a 240-minute travel time

  • Departure Locations: the employee home locations, with Demand_Location_ID as the ID field.

  • Travel Mode: driving.

  • Departing / Arriving: arrival, with 8:30 as the arrival time. Set the Time Zone to the one your locations are in (here US/Pacific). For public transport, use a date within 2 weeks either side of today.

  • Travel time (in minutes): 240, the maximum for Custom tools, so a time is returned for every journey that’s possible. A lower value marks anything longer as unreachable.

  • Arrival Locations: the 10 offices, with Site_Location_ID as the ID field.

  • Properties: travel_time and distance. Tick distance_breakdown or fares (UK public transport only) if you need them.

Every Departure Locations ID and Arrival Locations ID must be unique, or the tool stops with an error naming the duplicate.

Tip: with an arrival search, the tool sends one search per arrival location, so put the smaller layer on the arrival side. With a departure search, put the smaller layer on the departure side.

3. Run it and check the results

Run the tool and open the output layer’s attribute table. With 500 employees and 10 offices there are 5,000 rows, one for each employee–office pair, with:

  • Departure_locations_ID and Arrival_locations_id

  • reachable: 1 if the journey is within the travel time, 0 if not

  • travel_time: the journey time in seconds

  • distance: the journey distance in metres, if you ticked it

The output attribute table: 5,000 rows, one per employee and office, with reachable, travel time in seconds and distance in metres

To lay the results out as a matrix, with employees down the side and offices across the top, export the table with the Table To Excel tool and use a pivot table.

Going further

  • Very large matrices: use Travel Time Matrix Core instead. It’s much faster on big jobs, with a maximum travel time of 180 minutes and fewer settings. See Core or Custom tools: which should I use?

  • Alternative journeys: set a Search Range Width and Range Results to get up to five alternative journeys per pair. See How to use the common parameters in ArcGIS.

  • Distance and fares: use the Properties parameter to add distance, or fares for UK public transport.

Full parameter details are in the Travel Time Matrix docs.

Related Articles
Did this answer your question?