What's within a five hour drive of my home city if I can drive in any direction?

July 22, 2006 7:58 AM

Is there a google maps hack that will draw a circle around a given location to show a radius of distance (by mileage or time) around that location?

What I want is a rough idea of where I could get if I drove for 5 hours in any direction around my home city - ideally represented by a colorful graphic overlay.

You see this a lot in college viewbooks, etc -- radii of distance around the town so people know approximately how long it will take them to drive there. For example, concentric rings representing 5, 10, 15 hours.

posted by eirelander to Travel & Transportation (6 answers total)

If it exists, it would be a real feat : determining such things supposes to know the speed limit to each road, knowing where are the major geographical landscapes, stuffs like that. I think putting a plain red circle would be easy, but giving a more acurate representation of this, well... I'd buy it :)
posted by XiBe at 8:50 AM on July 22, 2006

MS Streets & Trips can do this.
posted by skwm at 9:17 AM on July 22, 2006

FWIW I used to do this with a paper map and compass, with each 50 miles representing about one hour of driving. And thanks for the info about S&T, skwm.
posted by davcoo at 9:29 AM on July 22, 2006

According to this earlier AskMe thread, you can do it with the pay version (US$20 - sounds reasonable) of Google Earth.
posted by hangashore at 9:38 AM on July 22, 2006

XiBe is right: it's not easy. A group in England has tried this, generating maps with, not concentric circles, but "isochrones" - lines of the same travel time.
posted by Dave 9 at 10:22 AM on July 22, 2006

Here's the link.
posted by Dave 9 at 10:23 AM on July 22, 2006 [2 favorites]