Understanding Catchment Areas

The Catchment Area is one of the most powerful tools in GOAT for accessibility analysis. While GOAT offers many other analysis tools such as heatmaps, buffers, spatial joins, and aggregations, we focus here on the Catchment Area tool as it is perfect for our supermarket accessibility analysis.

What is a Catchment Area?

A catchment area shows exactly how far people can travel from specific starting points within a certain time or distance. It's like a "service area" around a point - all places that are reachable within the defined limits.

In our case: Which areas in Mannheim are reachable within 15 minutes on foot from a supermarket?