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I am working on a local design project and need to determine if someone is local to my area to allow them to participate. Local, as defined by the group, means that the person is within 2 hr driving time based on Google Maps to 32 Vassar St., Cambridge, MA.
While I can figure out how to get travel times from point to point, I cannot seem to figure out if there is a way to create a polygon that displays the region which we consider local.
Any ideas on how to do this using Google tools?
Google's tools do not provide any way to do this kind of thing built in. While you might be able to do this by routing to a sufficient number of locations and checking the time, another tool that you might be interested in is Graphserver. GraphServer is a multimodal trip planner, which can take data from OpenStreetMap and other data sources. Some of the gallery images show growing shortest-path distance routing, and this is based on a similar metric.
The Google Group would be the appropriate place to discuss the possibilities of using this tool.
Note that this is not a pre-baked tool; it will likely require some investigation and work to get it to solve your problem, but the tool can be used to do it.
Take a look at the Mapnificent API.
Mapnificent provides dynamic public transport travel time maps for many cities in the US and some world wide. You can use the Mapnificent API to augment your Google Maps application with public transport travel time overlays.overlays.
Take a look at London here.
Have you tried the Route360°-API? It can be used to display a layer of travel time polygons on Google maps and it is free. There is a short tutorial on how to use the API. Maybe that helps.
Disclaimer: I work for iGeolise (creators of the API).
Without sending a lot of API calls to the Google API this will be difficult to do. You can use the TravelTime platform API to create drive time polygons on a map. I've attached an example of 2 hour drive time from Central London (we used Leaflet for the map, but it can be applied to any map)
Depending on how detailed you need the map to be, there's a free map generator tool that allows you to request a map or just contact the main page for an API key.
ESRI has published a geoprocessing sample server that produces "Drive time polygons".
It's got Cambridge MA roads, so you could probably take this:
And mash it into what you need.
We finally gave up trying to find something on the web and went ahead and built our own drive time polygon service using OSM road network data and POSTGIS. I am happy to share details of how we built it if you message me direct. Also here is how we packaged it up with Google Maps premium extension to give you idea:
