Highway Access in Europe

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Why we love it

A quick look at this map reveals stunning patterns. Some cities forbid highways from even approaching their centre, while others are surrounded by highways. The map reveals neighbourhood-level detail as well as citywide and even regional patterns. We love the addition of live web cams to help tell the story of European cities and their relationship to highways.

Why it works

This map shows you right away the areas in Europe within 10 minutes of a highway exit. It makes it easy to understand which cities and even neighbourhoods are most accessible by highway. The colours represent increments of 1-, 3-, 5-, and 10 minutes from a highway exit. The colours get brighter, much like car headlights, to show a city is closer to a highway. 

Important steps

  • Send set of points to ServiceAreas

    In ArcMap, take a set of points and send them to the ready-to-use tool called "ServiceAreas" in ArcGIS Online.
    Learn about the ready-to-use tool

  • Represent drive time

    It returns a set of polygons representing the areas that are within 1, 3, 5, and 10-minute drives from that point.

  • Construct a model

    Use ModelBuilder to construct a simple model to automate the process, or to send batches of points to the ServiceAreas tool.
    Watch ModelBuilder tutorial
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Requirements

  • Data and software

    You only need a set of points representing the highway exits. The road network is provided by ready-to-use services in ArcGIS Online. Software used: ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS Desktop.

  • Analysis

    The highway access areas were calculated using ready-to-use services hosted in ArcGIS which feature a road network from HERE. A simple geoprocessing tool sent 40,000+ exit locations to the service, which returned the 160,000+ service area polygons.

  • Time

    This will take about three hours total.
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Tips and tricks

  • Use ServiceAreas

    The ready-to-use ServiceAreas tool makes this map easy to create.
    Read the blog

  • Add brighter colours in service areas

    On the Dark Grey Canvas Basemap, the service areas are shown in gradually brighter colours, giving the map an “electric” look.
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Resources

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Headshot of Jim Herries, geographer and map curator

Map Author

Jim Herries

Applied geographer, map curator for Living Atlas of the World and Urban Observatory. I work with talented people to make better maps by eliminating the noise and increasing the signal.

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