Coverage analysis
What 30 minutes covers in New York.
New York is the only US market where drive-time analysis is often the wrong tool — but where it's used, the bridge-and-tunnel geometry creates the most extreme isochrone distortions in the country. Reachable area can vary by 5x depending on time of day and which crossing you route through.
At 30 minutes, the New York isochrone captures the regional catchment — a zone where trips are planned but customers are willing to cross neighborhood boundaries. Unlike a 100–350 km² circle, the real road-network polygon follows New York'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 30 minutes: Big-box, regional dining, car dealership, furniture, healthcare anchor, sporting goods. The 30-minute isochrone is the standard input for cannibalization studies and multi-unit expansion modeling.
The city-level population of 8,336,817 and a median household income of $70,663 give a sense of New York'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.