How The Telegraph Used TravelTime to Highlight Access to Hospitals Across the UK

The project

The Telegraph used TravelTime analysis to identify how many people in the UK do not have access to a coronavirus test centre within 1 hour. To do this Data Journalist Ashley Kirk needed to use software that was capable of drawing various drive time catchment areas for 43 test centres available to the public on 28 April.

Data exporting with Alteryx

For this analysis we used Alteryx, a data analytics platform. This kind of analysis work can also be done with QGIS or ArcGIS – get in touch if you need help with this.

How it worked:

1. Get the lat/long coordinate for each test centre
2. Added these coordinates to an excel spreadsheet
3. Find the Alteryx Isochrones macro 
4. Configure the macros to get drive time shapes for all 43 test centres, the shapes assumed people would travel during off peak times
5. 15 minute drive time
6. 30 minute drive time
7. 45 minute drive time
8. 1 hour drive time
9. Alteryx outputs the shape files

This shape file was then used to make a data visualisation by Ashley at The Telegraph. Using the shape file it was possible to cross reference these catchment areas with UK population data. This meant it was possible to find out that “,ore than a million people in the UK live over an hour from their nearest coronavirus testing centre” .

The final data visualisation results