A Comparison of Maptitude and Standard TransCAD

TransCAD

TransCAD is a sophisticated transportation planning application with extensive capabilities for the transportation planning industry. TransCAD has many data structures or objects that are not present in Maptitude.

Both TransCAD and Maptitude share similar formats for point, line, and area layers. However, TransCAD matrices, networks, and route systems cannot be viewed or imported into Maptitude.

TransCAD has extensive capabilities for manipulating route systems that are used for many things in transportation including designation of routes that connect locations along highways, transit networks, and air links. In TransCAD, you can create, edit, and display route systems as well as perform analysis of route system characteristics.

TransCAD supports linear referencing. TransCAD can query and display geographic data in route-milepost format, create data in this format, adjust mileposts, and create strip charts.

TransCAD has extensive capabilities for manipulating matrices. Matrices are used for distance and travel time tables as well as for maintaining flow information. In TransCAD, you can have an unlimited number of matrices of virtually unlimited size. There are numerous functions supported for performing matrix calculations. TransCAD also supports interactive matrix editing and display of matrix information in the form of desire lines.

TransCAD provides control over network turn restrictions, turn penalties, and transfer penalties and network links can be enabled and disabled.

In TransCAD, you can calculate summary statistics, produce tabulations, and cross-tabulations, correlation matrices, perform linear model estimation and evaluation, and calculate spatial statistics.

Maptitude

Maptitude is a Geographic Information System (GIS Software) that is designed to store, retrieve, manage, display, and analyze all types of geographic and spatial data.

Maptitude lets you produce maps and other graphic displays of geographic information for analysis and presentation. With these capabilities, Maptitude is a valuable tool to visualize spatial data. Maptitude is one of the most popular GIS software packages and has extensive functionality. The Maptitude capabilities include map and layer controls, visualization tools, geocoding, GIS mapping tools and geographic analytics (territory building tools, buffers, Thiessen Polygons, geographic overlay, hot spots, weighted center, shortest path, drive-time bands, drive-time territories, measuring tools, desire lines, surface analysis, data classification, GPS support, internet mapping, and facility location), imagery/raster tools, and relational database capabilities. Maptitude can find shortest paths on line layers one at a time, but does not support the TransCAD network tools.

Additional Notes on GISDK and Compatibility

The GISDK included with Maptitude is limited to the functions supported in Maptitude. Caliper does not guarantee the compatibility or interoperability of Maptitude and TransCAD. As part of our product development activities, enhancements to underlying file formats may appear first in one product and not in the other.