As many readers will know, Freeway, our drivetime or isochrone system, was not only the first product of AGS, but it was also the first commercially available system. The basic purpose and methodology used by Freeway has been relatively stable over time, despite major internal design changes and significant performance improvements.
Initially just available for the United States, Freeway can now produce isochrones for any place on earth. It has evolved from its initial form as a DLL plug-in for Windows desktop applications and Freeway is now available on any platform using the API application or as a command line program that can be quietly run in the background on desktops and servers.
Freeway 2026 uses data from Open Street Map (OSM) extracted in late December of 2025. This update is important in many areas of the world which are experiencing either rapid growth or heavy infrastructure investment. We also made some minor performance improvements to the core shortest path algorithm – such as replacing some repeatedly called internal functions with in-line code just to avoid pushing and popping registers on the stack.
The most important change for 2026 came from a collaborative effort with Tom Kessler and Andy Straker at SiteSeer (www.siteseer.com) who were instrumental in guiding and testing some internal changes which are implemented in known high traffic congestion areas in the United States. We all know those areas, like the west side of LA, where five miles across Santa Monica Boulevard is expected to take at least forty minutes. We identified those areas, analyzed them, and implemented customizable congestion zones within the system. The result is more accurate drive times in such areas, while not requiring users to know if the location selected is in a high congestion zone and adjust parameters accordingly.
In addition to generating isochrones for individual locations, Freeway can generate a single coverage polygon for a set of locations (as in the map below), or can very effectively process a file of locations, including variable drive time settings based on a database field.
Where does Freeway go from here? As fast as the system currently is, total CPU use on a multi-core processor is limited to one core. While we had great success in multi-threading our Snapshot data environment, exhaustive shortest path applications like isochrones are notoriously difficult to implement in a threaded form. Some of the improvements made to 2026 came about through our explorations in parallel processing and those continue with some promising results already achieved. Parallel processing will reduce run times by at least fifty percent, so stay tuned.