Desire Line Analysis
Also known as: Desire Line Mapping, OD Flow Line Analysis, Travel Desire Lines, Desire Path Flow Analysis
Desire line analysis reveals the underlying demand for travel between places by drawing straight lines that connect each origin to each destination, with line width or weight proportional to the volume of flow between them. The term comes from transportation planning, where a 'desire line' represents the direct, idealized path a traveller would take if no network constrained them — capturing where people want to go, not how the roads make them go. Aggregating trips into an origin–destination matrix and rendering it as weighted lines exposes the dominant corridors of movement, making desire lines a foundational tool for visualizing and analysing travel demand.
Key highlights
- Exposes the dominant geography of travel demand at a glance, independent of the current network.
- Simple to construct from an OD matrix and zone centroids, with no routing required.
- Excellent for communicating demand patterns and corridor priorities to non-technical audiences.
- Reveals demand–supply mismatches where strong desire lines lack adequate infrastructure.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use desire line analysis to visualize and explore origin–destination travel demand — commuting patterns, transit ridership, cycling potential, migration, or freight — when you want to see the geography of where people move between places before worrying about how. It is ideal for communicating demand to stakeholders, identifying dominant corridors, and spotting mismatches between demand and existing infrastructure. It works whenever you have an OD matrix and zone locations. It is less suitable when the actual routed path matters (use network or flow-mapping methods that follow the network), when the number of zones is so large that even filtered lines overwhelm the map, or when directionality and asymmetry of flows must be preserved precisely, which straight undirected lines can obscure.
Strengths & limitations
- Exposes the dominant geography of travel demand at a glance, independent of the current network.
- Simple to construct from an OD matrix and zone centroids, with no routing required.
- Excellent for communicating demand patterns and corridor priorities to non-technical audiences.
- Reveals demand–supply mismatches where strong desire lines lack adequate infrastructure.
- Straight lines ignore the real network, so they show demand geometry, not achievable routes.
- Dense matrices produce visual clutter that filtering can only partly resolve.
- Results are sensitive to zone definition and centroid placement (the modifiable areal unit problem).
- Overlapping and crossing lines can mislead about which flows are largest or where they concentrate.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Why are desire lines drawn straight instead of along roads?
The straight line deliberately abstracts away the existing network to show pure demand — where people want to go regardless of how the current infrastructure forces them to travel. This makes desire line analysis the demand-side complement to network routing, and it is precisely the straightness that lets planners spot corridors where strong demand is not yet matched by good infrastructure. If you need the actual travelled path, you route the flows over the network instead, which is flow-mapping analysis.
How do you stop a desire line map from becoming an unreadable hairball?
Because a full OD matrix has thousands of cells, you must filter and simplify: apply a volume threshold to drop minor flows, keep only the top-n strongest lines, or use edge-bundling to merge nearby lines into corridors, and encode volume through width, opacity, or colour so dominant flows stand out. The goal is to preserve the analytically important structure — the heavy corridors and the gaps — while removing the clutter of countless small flows.
How does desire line analysis relate to gravity and spatial interaction models?
Desire line analysis visualizes an origin–destination flow matrix, while gravity and spatial interaction models predict the values in that matrix from zone sizes and the cost of travel between them. The two are complementary: a spatial interaction model generates or completes the OD matrix, and desire lines render it geographically so the predicted demand can be inspected, validated, and communicated. Desire lines are thus a natural display layer for the output of interaction models.
Sources
- 1.Boyce, D. E., & Williams, H. C. W. L. (2015). Forecasting Urban Travel: Past, Present and Future. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham.ISBN 9781848440319
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Desire Line Analysis. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/human-geography/desire-line-analysis