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How to use the quick tools in ArcGIS
How to use the quick tools in ArcGIS

Tutorial on how to use the quick tools for creating isochrones, travel time matrices, and routes in ArcGIS.

Updated over a week ago

Access

The Quick Tools give the simplest access to the TravelTime capabilities inside of ArcGIS Pro. They can be accessed from the TravelTime banner in the top navigation:

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Quick Time Map

The Quick Time Map tool allows you to generate isochrones (‘trade areas’) without having to add any data to the map. The arrival/departure point for the isochrones can be selected in any of three ways:

  1. Clicking on the map

  2. Entering a street address

  3. Entering lat-long coordinates

To open the Quick Time Map configuration window, click on the TravelTime platform banner in the top nav, then select the dropdown arrow below the Quick Time Map tool.

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Make sure that the Quick Time Map tool is highlighted in the top nav (if it isn’t then just click to select it), then click on the point on the map where you want to calculate the isochrones from. You should end up with three public transport isochrones generated, representing the 15/30/45 minute reachable areas, something like this:


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To create just one isochrone, enter the value ‘0’ into two of the Journey Time boxes in the Quick Time Map configuration window.

Instead of setting the arrival/departure point by clicking on the map, you can also enter an address or a pair of lat-long coordinates. When entering an address into the tool, the TravelTime Geocoder is used in the background.

You can find more information on creating isochrones and extracting data from within them here.

Quick Route

The Quick Route tool allows you to calculate the fastest route between two points. This route is then displayed on the map, and as a set of turn-by-turn directions in the corresponding Attribute Table.

As with the other Quick tools, the arrival/departure point for the route can simply be selected by clicking on the map, entering a postcode, or entering a lat-long.

In the example below we’ve used the tool to calculate the public transport route between two pairs of coordinates in Sydney, Australia. Opening the Attribute Table of the output layer reveals the corresponding directions for the route.

The tool configuration:

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The output:

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Quick Time Filter

The Quick Time Filter tool can be used to do two things at once:

  1. Separate a set of points into ‘reachable’ and ‘unreachable’ buckets based on a maximum travel time to or from a set location

  2. Calculate the journey times from one location to 1000s of other locations

To run the tool you need to first add the layer of points that we want to filter onto the map. Here we’ve added 500 locations in the UK using the Add Data tool:


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With this point layer selected, the Quick Time Filter tool now becomes available from the TravelTime banner in the top nav.

The configuration window can be opened by clicking the dropdown button below the Quick Time Filter tool, and has very similar fields to the other Quick tools.

The Journey Time field sets the cut-off time for points in the layer being marked as Reachable or Unreachable. The maximum value is 240 minutes (4 hours).

After running the tool, the output layer can be viewed in two different ways:


Visual representation of reachable and unreachable points:

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Attribute table with the exact travel times (in seconds) to or from all of the reachable locations:

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To learn how to calculate the travel times between multiple origins and multiple destinations in one go, check out our Travel Time Matrix tutorial here.

Summary

The Quick Tools provide the simplest way to access the core TravelTime functionality. Beyond this, the Simple and Advanced tools provide much more configurability, and the ability to process large data sets by running directly of layers on points.

To learn more about these tools, please visit the ArcGIS Simple Tools tutorial.

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