Why radius grants create disputes
A radius is simple to write into an agreement and simple to attack afterwards. It grants area that the franchisee cannot practically serve — across a river, the wrong side of a freeway — while withholding area they obviously do serve because it falls a hundred metres outside the circle.
Both errors generate grievances. One costs the franchisee revenue they were promised; the other blocks the franchisor from granting a site that would not have competed at all.
What a defensible boundary looks like
- Derived from drive time on the actual road network, not straight-line distance.
- Stated at a drive time the franchisor can justify from operating data.
- Checked for overlap against every adjacent franchisee before it is granted.
- Reproducible — the same inputs regenerate the same boundary years later.
- Independent of any single vendor's proprietary panel, so it can be re-verified.
The test
If a franchisee's counsel asks how the boundary was derived, the answer should be a method, not a product name.
Narrative Geo does not sample. Every trade area is routed on the actual road network with OSRM, against full Census/ACS population and a maintained POI set. The drive-time matrix is precomputed at 1.08 billion rows, so a national query across a 20,000-store chain returns in seconds rather than being metered per location.