How Many People Can You Reach From One Spot?

Someone doing market research needed to know how many people lived within a drive of a Bay Area location, and who those people were. A straight-line circle on a map is useless. So I built a tool that draws the real drive-time area, with traffic, and counts the actual population inside it. Built in a day.

Try It Yourself

2.4M

People within a 30-min drive of one East Bay address

Any US

Address in the country, not just the Bay Area

1 day

From the question to a working tool

Drop a pin. See who's in range.

Enter an address, pick a drive time, and the map draws the real reachable area and counts the people inside it. Here it is centered on Berkeley at a 30-minute drive.

Drive-time reach map showing a 30-minute driving area around a Berkeley address, with about 1.47 million people inside it, plus age, sex, and income filters

Not a circle on a map. A real answer.

Most "radius" tools draw a straight-line circle and call it reach. But nobody drives in a straight line. This tool uses real road networks and traffic, then pulls actual census data for the area it draws.

Real drive-time area, with traffic

Pick 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes and light or busy traffic. The map draws the actual area you can reach by car, following the road network, not a circle.

The actual population inside it

It counts the real number of people who live in the drawn area, pulled from US Census data, tract by tract. A live, sourced number, not an estimate off a circle.

Filter who counts

Narrow the count by age, sex, and household income. "How many adults 25 to 54 with income over $100k are within 30 minutes?" is one question this answers.

Draw to exclude

Sketch a shape on the map to drop an area you do not care about, and the population recounts instantly. Useful for carving out a competitor's turf or an area on the wrong side of a bridge.

Works for any US address

The Bay Area presets are just a starting point. Type any address in the country and it draws the reach and counts the people the same way.

What it took to build this.

This is the kind of analysis that companies pay thousands a year for through enterprise GIS platforms. I stitched it together from a traffic-aware routing service and live census data, wrapped it in a clean map, and put it on the internet in a day, running for almost nothing.

Drive-Time Engine

A traffic-aware routing API draws the real reachable area for the chosen time and traffic level, accounting for how far you actually get on real roads.

Census Population

Live American Community Survey data at the census-tract level. The tool keeps every tract whose center falls inside the drawn area and sums the people, by age and sex band, plus area median income.

All Filtering Runs Local

The data loads once per drawn area, then age, sex, income, and draw-to-exclude all recompute instantly in the browser. No extra calls, no lag while you explore.

Cheap to Run

A single page plus a thin serverless function on Cloudflare. The map tiles and census data are free. The whole thing runs at near-zero monthly cost.

It's live right now. Go drop a pin.

Try one of the Bay Area presets, or type in your own address anywhere in the US. The best way to understand what I can build is to use something I've built.

Open the Reach Map →

I can build something like this for you.

Every business has a question that a custom tool could answer in seconds. I find the question, pull in the data, build the tool, and deploy it. What could yours look like?

Book a call

Or email chuck@startuptosold.com