Conveyal's web-based Analysis tool helps you understand how multi-modal transportation networks connect people with destinations.

Cutting-edge computation makes it faster and easier for your team to calculate rigorous, research-backed accessibility indicators. Interactive visualizations reveal latent patterns and network effects, allowing you to compare prospective scenarios and future plans holistically. Leveraging open data now available around the world, Conveyal measures and visualizes who can reach what, and how reliably. Conveyal empowers urban planners, mobility operators, and researchers to understand the access different populations experience, across different locations and times.

To learn more about Conveyal's capabilities, watch the following video (subtitled and silent, no need to adjust your sound). Click here to see the demo on its own page.

Conveyal users recognize it as a powerful tool that has advanced the state of practice, helping bring accessibility analysis to a now prominent role shaping and managing livable, sustainable cities around the world. We have implemented and refined methods long advocated in urban planning research, but previously limited by data storage and processing capacity. Read on to learn more about ways your team could benefit from a Conveyal subscription.

Detail

All travel along roads uses true network distance down to the millimeter. Full transit schedules are reflected down to the second. Demographic and opportunity data are represented on fine regular grids or at exact geographic coordinates. Every minute of a departure time window is considered, with opportunity weighting functions applied smoothly at one-second resolution. Where fluctuations are inherent in schedules or scenario parameters, Conveyal shows you the error bars.

In the pursuit of better understanding, we systematically strive to eliminate spatial and temporal aggregation from Conveyal's underlying calculations. You can calculate accessibility for millions of individual origins, then select summary measures for the full population of a district, city, or region. Our highly optimized algorithms paired with cloud storage and computation mean we can put the modifiable areal unit problem behind us for good.

Depth

Conveyal gives you unique ways to visualize areas reachable within a certain travel time (isochrones) or accessibility indicators throughout a region. For more customized in-depth analysis, Conveyal also ensures interoperability with common GIS platforms. By exporting standard raster and vector data formats, you can interface with your existing workflows in desktop tools such as QGIS or ArcGIS.

Data can be imported from various sources such as polygonal zones or lists of points, and our support team can pre-load detailed layers at block-level geometries (e.g. automatically from LODES in the US). Populations, jobs, and other geolocated data can be broken down into any number of categories, faithfully reflecting any data sources available to you.

Speed

Scenarios are applied to the baseline network instantaneously, and results are visible in a matter of seconds. Conveyal's built-in scenario editor allows you to sketch alternative route alignments or schedules interactively, immediately compare travel times and accessibility on the map, and see the access impact across the entire region before the end of your meeting. The thousands of hours of computation and millions of computations required are effortlessly distributed to our computation cluster, which scales up to give you results in minutes instead of days.

Nuance

Describing public transit outcomes poses particular challenges. With scheduled services, travel and wait times can vary greatly depending on when you depart. When drafting scenarios, headways may be known but not exact schedules. Different passengers have different tolerances for travel time. For these reasons and more, single numbers are not sufficient to accurately represent travel time and accessibility.

Where details are known, times are accurate down to the second. Where things are less certain, Conveyal gives you a clear picture of the range of possible outcomes.

Engagement

Conveyal is designed to facilitate discussion, engagement, and consultation between planners, riders, and community stakeholders. Conveyal lets you to sketch and interactively explore high-level scenarios, such as a new line or revised schedule, without sacrificing the quality of results. Results for a whole region can be published to an easy to understand public engagement website that lets riders explore how their daily commute might change, and which new opportunities they can reach after a network redesign or other service modification.

Collaboration

Your organization will have a secure online workspace that helps you collaborate on scenarios, sharing data sources and results. We take care of your data: all communications with our servers are encrypted and access is controlled by an industry standard authentication mechanism. Our servers are intentionally located in jurisdictions with strong privacy protections to facilitate compliance with legal requirements.

Openness

The Conveyal team has a long history of advancing open source software and open data formats like GTFS and OpenStreetMap. We believe that open standards and open licenses have an important role to play in planning and policy work, ensuring reproducibility of results and transparency of public decision processes, as well as reusability of software created through public sector investment. Our core routing engine is published and freely downloadable under an open-source license. We are constantly developing new features and analysis capabilities in collaboration with our customers, and our commitment to open software fosters the potential for wider public benefit from this work.

Experience

Our team's sustained focus on evidence-based transportation and land use decision support stretches back over a decade, through eight years as an independent firm to our origins within New York nonprofit OpenPlans. Throughout that history we have helped standardize and popularize the GTFS format, advocated for open transit schedule data across the US and Europe, and contributed OSM data and software tooling. We are among the originators of open source public transit routing tools, creating and contributing to influential projects since 2008. We have been the primary contributors to OpenTripPlanner, designing and developing successor projects R4 and R5 optimized for low resource consumption, real-time updates, and network analysis. Our software is used daily by millions of passengers as well as transportation planners around the world.