Coverage analysis
What 45 minutes covers in Austin.
Austin's drive-time map is shaped by the Colorado River, a single congested loop highway (MoPac/I-35), and explosive northward sprawl into Williamson County. A 15-minute radius from downtown looks tiny on paper but routinely fails to capture the actual catchment because of bridge bottlenecks.
At 45 minutes, the Austin isochrone captures the extended regional draw — a regional footprint where destination-category businesses draw from a wide geographic spread. Unlike a 200–600 km² circle, the real road-network polygon follows Austin'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 45 minutes: Regional mall anchor, hospital, specialty medical, premium auto, luxury retail, cinema. The 45-minute isochrone is the standard input for regional territory design and logistics network planning.
The city-level population of 974,447 and a median household income of $86,556 give a sense of Austin'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.