Service Areas, Traffic and QGIS

Our author Riccardo recently published an article on GeoNet where he described the traffic aware analysis of service areas (isochrones) in ArcGIS Pro with the analytical support of ArcGIS Online. I searched for a way to do something similar in QGIS. So let’s follow the white rabbit.

Where to get the traffic datafrom

Unfortunately I was not able to find an online service that offers traffic aware routing or isochrone analysis based on an open source approach (Do you know any?). Yet you can use openrouteservice.org or graphhopper but the results of isochrone analysis will not take traffic into account. In the original article it is mentioned that AGOL uses traffic patterns from here so I checked their website. The free tier plan allows you to request their API 15.000 times per month.
You only need to create an app on the developer page and off you go as you only need the appid and an app code to authenticate yourself.

Wrapping it up in Python

I am using the Routing API to get isochrones for 10, 20 and 30min of car travel from Birmingham from them:

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
import urllib2, json
appcode ="you fancy code from here"
appID = "you fancy ID from here"
timestamp = "2017-12-01T07:00:00Z02"
coordinates = "52.471868,-1.897253" 
url = "https://isoline.route.cit.api.here.com/routing/7.2/calculateisoline.json?app_id=" + appID + "&app_code=" + appcode + "&mode=shortest;car;traffic:enabled&start=geo!" + coordinates + "&maxpoints=500&departure=" + timestamp + "&range=600,1200,1800&rangetype=time&jsonAttributes=41"
response = urllib2.urlopen(url)
data = json.load(response)

Unfortunately the response from the API is quite “bad” as it gives you a long list of long values:

So of course we need to parse them properly and put them in a virtual layer. As I am interested in the areas as well I am using an equal area projection for Europe (I hope this is right?!) with the EPSG 102013.

vl = QgsVectorLayer("Polygon?crs=EPSG:102013", "temporary_polygons", "memory")
pr = vl.dataProvider()
pr.addAttributes([QgsField("time", QVariant.String),
                    QgsField("depart", QVariant.String),
                    QgsField("area", QVariant.Double)])
vl.updateFields()
for polygon in reversed(data['response']['isoline']):
	pointArray = []
	for ind in range(0,len(polygon['component'][0]['shape'])):
		if ind%2 == 1:
			pointArray.append(xform.transform(QgsPoint(polygon['component'][0]['shape'][ind], polygon['component'][0]['shape'][ind-1])))
	#combine to polygon:
	feature = QgsFeature()
	feature.setGeometry(QgsGeometry.fromPolygon([pointArray]))
	feature.setAttributes([polygon['range'], timestamp[0:16], feature.geometry().area()/1000000])
	pr.addFeatures([feature])

QgsMapLayerRegistry.instance().addMapLayer(vl)

Now you can see we have all the ingredients to make a nice loop using different departure times and to get a nice analysis for the places that can be reached in a given time for different departure times throughout the day with traffic patterns in mind. If we want to determine “real” commuting patterns you can also switch from departure to arrival (as noted in the API documentation) so you can model the patterns even better. But the presentation of your results might be best using the timeManager plugin from Anita. The result of a looped analysis throughout a day might look like this if you apply some style-magic:

You can download the script for the API calls and add your own app credentials.