Coverage analysis
What 45 minutes on foot 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 45 minutes on foot, the Chicago walk-time isochrone captures the urban mobility boundary — a wider pedestrian catchment used for destination walking, accessibility auditing, and urban mobility analysis. Unlike a simple ≈ 3.5 km radius circle, the real pedestrian-network polygon follows Chicago's actual street grid, accounts for crossings, parks, and dedicated walk paths, and contracts sharply around freeways, rail corridors, and waterways that break pedestrian continuity.
Walk-shed area at 45 minutes: ≈ 7–15 km². The 45-minute isochrone is the standard input for urban accessibility auditing and transit-gap identification.
The city-level population of 2,696,555 and a median household income of $63,470 give a sense of Chicago's density, but the figure that matters for walkable-retail siting is the population inside the pedestrian polygon — not the city as a whole. That number shifts dramatically depending on whether you're anchored in a high-density urban core or a lower-density neighbourhood where blocks are long and crossings are scarce. Use the tool above to set your actual candidate address, then generate the isochrone to see the real walk shed.