Open Catchment Accessibility Analyzer

Open Catchment & Accessibility Analyzer

Perform location-based accessibility and catchment analysis using OpenStreetMap data. The Actor computes radius-based service coverage, distance and travel metrics, and produces structured outputs suitable for urban planning, retail analysis, infrastructure assessment, and GIS-driven decision making.

Analyze service coverage and accessibility around any location using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data.

This Actor generates distance-based catchment metrics (e.g. 300 m, 500 m, 1 km) around one or more locations and exports results in multiple formats for planning, site selection, and accessibility analysis.

🚀 What this Actor does

For each selected location (“anchor”), the Actor:

Creates distance-based catchments (buffers in meters)

Retrieves nearby services (POIs) from OpenStreetMap

Counts and evaluates service coverage per radius

Produces clean, structured outputs ready for analysis or reporting

📤 Outputs

The Actor can export results as:

📊 Apify Dataset (interactive table)

📁 CSV

📘 Excel (XLSX)

🧾 Summary JSON

🧠 Typical use cases

Business & retail site selection

Service gap analysis (where services are missing)

Urban accessibility studies

Transport & walkability screening

Preliminary spatial analysis (without GIS software)

⚙️ Key features

📍 Analyze accessibility around any coordinate or address

📏 Distance-based catchments (buffers in meters)

🏪 Multiple service categories (businesses, retail, food, transport, etc.)

🗺️ Powered by OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)

📤 Clean exports: Dataset, CSV, XLSX, summary JSON

⚙️ Preset-based workflows for common planning tasks

▶️ How it works

You provide one or more anchors (latitude / longitude)

You define catchment radii (e.g. 300 m, 500 m, 1000 m)

You select service categories

The Actor:

Fetches POIs from OpenStreetMap

Counts services within each radius

Generates structured outputs

🧪 Example input

Austin, TX – ZIP 78753

⚠️ Some parameters expect JSON arrays encoded as strings, as required by the Apify input form.

{ "presetId": "business_placement", "studyName": "Austin TX 78753 – Catchment Demo", "anchors": "[{"id":"austin_78753","name":"Austin TX 78753","lat":30.38353,"lon":-97.67335,"type":"zip_center"}]", "radiiMeters": "[300,500,1000,3000]", "serviceCategories": "["businesses","pharmacy","post_office","public_transport_stop"]", "outputFormats": "["dataset","csv","xlsx","summaryJson"]", "outputMode": "summary", "includeGeometries": true, "servicesSource": "overpass", "maxResultsPerCategory": 2000 }

⚙️ Input parameters (overview) anchors (required, stringified JSON array)

Locations to analyze.

[ { "id": "site_1", "name": "My location", "lat": 40.18, "lon": 44.51 } ]

radiiMeters (stringified JSON array)

Catchment distances in meters.

[300, 500, 1000]

serviceCategories

OSM-based service groups, for example:

businesses

business_retail

business_food

business_services

pharmacy

post_office

public_transport_stop

outputFormats

Any combination of:

dataset

csv

xlsx

summaryJson

📊 Dataset output (example)

Each dataset row represents:

Anchor × Radius × Service Category

{ "study_name": "Austin TX 78753 – Catchment Demo", "anchor_id": "austin_78753", "anchor_name": "Austin TX 78753", "radius_m": 500, "service_category": "pharmacy", "services_count": 4, "coverage_adequate": true }

📁 Key-Value Store files File Description catchment_metrics.csv Tabular catchment metrics catchment_metrics.xlsx Excel version summary.json High-level summary INPUT Stored input (reproducibility) 🧾 Summary JSON (example) { "studyName": "Austin TX 78753 – Catchment Demo", "anchorsAnalyzed": 1, "radiiMeters": [300, 500, 1000, 3000], "serviceCategories": ["businesses", "pharmacy", "post_office", "public_transport_stop"], "keyFindings": { "pharmacy": { "500": "adequate", "300": "limited" }, "public_transport_stop": { "300": "adequate" } } }

🌍 Data source

OpenStreetMap (OSM) via Overpass API

Data quality depends on OSM community coverage in each region

⚠️ Notes & limitations

Distance-based (Euclidean) analysis

Network-based travel time is not included yet

Population metrics are placeholders (future extension)

🧩 Roadmap ideas

Walk / drive travel-time catchments

Population-weighted accessibility

User-provided POIs (GeoJSON upload)

Advanced business-specific presets

📬 Support & feedback

For questions, ideas, or feature requests, please contact the author via Apify.

📜 License & compliance

Uses open data from OpenStreetMap

Does not scrape restricted websites

Fully compliant with Apify Store rules

✅ Store-ready

This Actor is ready for:

Apify Store publication

Pay-per-event monetization

Reuse as a template for future spatial analysis tools