I work in an organization which implements programs which impact public health at the state level. We have recently been working on analyses assessing the accessibility of services for state residents, especially in rural areas. We have been operationalizing accessibility using isochrones created using the Esri Routing Service, and while this has helped identify areas which are comparatively far away from available service locations, it can require subsequent generation of isochrone service areas to determine what the travel time might be from a service location to a faraway community. Further, if we overshoot the travel time from that community, we may have to run another isochrone analysis to get a more accurate measurement of travel time. To avoid this clumsy approach to evaluating travel times to services from across our state, I think a raster dataset with cell values representing the distance to the nearest service location would be useful.
While looking to see if something like this is already possible, I found an example of a travel time raster created by @curtvprice and shown in his July 18, 2018 reply to his postCan I use Cost Distance tools to model travel times?
In his case, though, the travel time cost surface was made using his own data, and we are not in a position to use our own data to generate a cost surface. Since the Esri Routing Service is able to generate isochrone polygons, though, I feel like it should be technically feasible to use that data as an input to generate a travel time cost surface. If possible, I believe we would significantly benefit from the ability to create a travel time cost surface and/or a derivative travel time raster using the Esri Routing Service as input data. I believe it would allow us to spend our credits and perform analyses more purposefully and enable us to generate more insights from each analysis we run.
