Coverage analysis
What 10 minutes covers in Chicago.
Chicago's grid is the most consistent in any major US city, which makes baseline isochrones unusually clean — until you account for Lake Michigan erasing the eastern half and the expressway network (Kennedy, Eisenhower, Dan Ryan, Edens) creating sharp asymmetries between in-loop and outbound reach.
At 10 minutes, the Chicago isochrone captures the neighborhood trade area — the area where customers make routine, repeat visits without deliberate trip planning. Unlike a 12–30 km² in open suburban markets; highly compressed in dense urban grids circle, the real road-network polygon follows Chicago's actual highway corridors, accounts for bridge and interchange chokepoints, and respects the natural and built barriers that force drivers to detour.
Best-fit categories at 10 minutes: Fast-casual, fitness, neighborhood grocery, nail & hair, dry cleaning, tutoring. The 10-minute isochrone is the standard input for footprint mapping and proximity-marketing radius decisions.
The city-level population of 2,696,555 and a median household income of $63,470 give a sense of Chicago's economic density, but the figure that matters for site selection is the population inside the polygon — not the city as a whole. That number shifts dramatically depending on whether you're drawing from a high-density urban core or a lower-density suburban corridor. Use the tool above to set your actual candidate location, then generate the isochrone to see the real catchment.