22 ms·

A new kind of map: it’s about time

968 points by uptown 9y ago

_h_o_d_ 9y ago
I love this idea, and also its acknowledgement of prior time maps for rail and other psychogeographic forebears. Its ability to put in relevant data in rational time-based space stops some of those issues that make us take a longer or particular direction because of habit, fear, or misunderstanding of the timespace about us. Nonetheless as a map-lover, I'd love to see how more contextual information could be added for serendipitous and geographical observation.
iamben 9y ago
This is absolutely amazing. If I could use this with a more intelligent search (pub / bar return different things, for instance - whereas I want to search for "places I can get a beer"), this would be fantastic.
- baccredited 9y ago
  Agree. Show me a time map for nearby draft beers with Beer Advocate or Ratebeer scores and I would use this all the time. Bonus points to restrict to certain styles like IPA, lagers, etc. Untappd could actually do this if they wanted.
rmdundon 9y ago
Interesting concept. I like the overlay idea, but I think simply having that as a standalone map would not be useful in other areas where distance as the crow flies ≠ time traveled. Areas with large bodies of water (like adjacent peninsulas), mountainous areas or areas with strange road infrastructure (Some parts of Virginia). Nonetheless, an interesting concept!
- zwily 9y ago
  My impression is that the distance is not "as a crow flies". It's distance given the mode of travel you specify.
- lemonlyman516 9y ago
  The distance changes as you change your mode of transportation - so barriers would be taken into account for the time traveled.
microcolonel 9y ago
I wonder how it would look if you directly distorted the map by travel time.
- qznc 9y ago
  This. I was hoping for some weird pictures of distorted maps.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    For what it's worth, I think it would be computationally quite hard. You would have to pick a set of points and maybe isomap them from three dimensions (x, y, and time) to two, then find a visually acceptable cage transformation using those points as anchors. You'd have to do this for each query.
    - ctdonath 9y ago
      Alternative would be to keep the standard geographic map, but have clear points on all possible destinations X minutes away - ideally with a slider, watching the "X minutes" points slide around. Actually pretty easy, given each road segment knowing expected speed, and "X+1" just extending into untraveled areas.
      - jamessb 9y ago
        There are many interactive isochrone maps with sliders - one such example is [1]. Other isochrone maps listed here [2] may also have time sliders. [1]: http://property.mapumental.com http://property.mapumental.com [2]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Isochrone#Examples https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Isochrone#Examples
        ctdonath 9y ago
        They're all public transit. I'm looking for general roads, re: "I'm here, where can I drive to in 35 minutes?"
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
It'd be cool to see a similar map at relativistic scales that shows the relationship between travel time for different speeds and the elapsed time at the origin and destination.
arafalov 9y ago
I would love a distance map that includes public transport travel time. For example, if I live close to metro/subway/train and I want to do really big grocery shopping. It would be interesting to see the nearest grocery that includes those I could reach by jumping on the metro and with minimal total walking. It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own neighborhood.
- forrestthewoods 9y ago
  I wrote a tool that kinda does that. It shows how far you can travel by different modes of transport, including public transit. It also work with time of day to account for both bus schedules and traffic. https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-times-378009330ffa https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-times-3...
- roywiggins 9y ago
  Not quite, but it will show you an area within X minutes of transit from a given location. https://www.mapnificent.net https://www.mapnificent.net
- jka 9y ago
  Applied to the maps in the article, this could end up introducing animation to the chart. If your local light rail arrives every 30 minutes, then your ETA to arrive at various different grocery stores is gradually changing, drawing nearer to the center, and climbs up a steep (half hour) cliff when you aren't close enough to the station to catch the train. You could even colour the destinations by level of urgency - blue for destinations where you can casually stroll to the station, or red for ones where you really need to leave right away to catch the train.
- avel 9y ago
  Also check out https://citymapper.com https://citymapper.com for something close to what you describe.
munro 9y ago
I wonder if it would be readable to overlay the distance map with the street map, and connect the two with a line.
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Or connect the paths along sidewalks etc that will get you there in the claimed time.
udfalkso 9y ago
Very neat idea! I can't seem to run a search in my location in NY. "Find Me" changes the address but the results are stuck in Seattle. I can't seem to change the query term either.
panic 9y ago
This is really cool! I wonder what the other boundaries on the map (road, neighborhood, city, etc.) would look like when projected onto the time view.
hnnsj 9y ago
How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure out how to get there.
- peatmoss 9y ago
  If you were interested in trip chaining, you could still pick the direction you wanted to head.
  - peteretep 9y ago
    The map doesn't guarantee that at all. Two items on the map can appear next to each other and take a very long time to get between -- perhaps they're separated by a freeway that you can't cross, for example.
    - dhritzkiv 9y ago
      I feel that should be accounted for in the time it takes to reach that location, and therefore its place on the map.
      - jdminhbg 9y ago
        Imagine a long river with a bridge at the point you are currently located, but no other bridges. Two places across from the river from each other might each be an hour away, but two hours apart from each other because you have to come back to your current location to cross the river. They'd look nearby on this map because they're in close places and similar times to get to.
        SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        This is actually an extremely common case with public transportation: There are two channels of buses going N-S in the city, and both channels meet downtown. From downtown, two locations can be about equally distant in travel time northwards, and nearby in E-W distance compared to their N-S displacement, but they're separated by a freeway and lie on different N-S channels, and so the E-W distance takes as long to commute (by foot or transit) as going downtown and back northwards would.
wavefunction 9y ago
Removing the geography seems great until you are trying to cross rivers or highways.
- Nagyman 9y ago
  This map isn't for navigating to the place in mind; it's more of a discovery tool based on travel time. Pick a place and then you get a standard geography based map.
- danso 9y ago
  Ostensibly, these kind of maps imply the time-cost of those obstacles more accurately than a standard map in which as-the-bird-flies distances are more explicitly shown.
- chippy 9y ago
  It does account for it, but only for one starting point. So the spatial relationship of the objects to each other mean less than the relationship of the objects independently with the starting position (the centre). A user would have to do it multiple times manually, or specify some kind of travelling salesman route to figure out the best way. I think our brains do this more efficiently and quickly but this would really be worth looking into with this new map.
sulam 9y ago
Isochronic maps are pretty awesome. However, an isochrone-only projection that ignores geography is prone to the same sort of errors that the alternative creates. One simple example that is personal to me -- when I moved from SF to the East Bay, my commute into the city shortened by ~10 minutes because of where I'd been living (out by Ocean Beach) vs where I moved to and the nature of driving and public transit in the SF Bay Area. And yet as far as my friends who lived and worked in SF were concerned, I was now in this mystical place that they didn't really spend any time in or know much about (the perception of Oakland is also contributing here). It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up feeling kind of close. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new-economic-megaregions-map/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-revea...
Sniffnoy 9y ago
Of course, distance on this map corresponds to travel time only so long as one of the points is the center; for a multi-leg trip, it still essentially requires manual inquiry and comparison.
danso 9y ago
Pretty neat. I frequently use the example of Yelp's list and map views as an example of how maps aren't always better, even as they are more appealing compared to a text list. But I frequently use the list view because I can sort by distance, while still seeing the other important info (such as star rating, cost, food type). But distance isn't the only important geospatial factor. Frequently I want to find a place to eat/drink that's on the way to another destination (such as a movie theater). This kind of chrono map would be more useful in a new city in which I don't know that a place 0.2 mi away to the west involves crossing an interstate. In a setting I'm familiar with, it's probably not particularly useful on mobile (given the limited dimensions for showing points and text labels), but could be great on print displays. It'd allow designers to show geospatial/time info without also having to render a full map. On the topic of Yelp and other listing services, maybe some refinements could be made to make lists more geospatially useful. No reason why the list view has to show just distance, rather than time traveled. Or to include a filter option for direction, so that I can just see things west or south of me. It's pretty frustrating sometimes having to switch back and forth between list and map.
npolet 9y ago
This is a pretty neat idea, and I could see myself using this in day to day life. It's nice to see real thought, study and execution into new ways of portraying things that have the possibility of becoming stale. While maps and their functionalities are very much "still in development" with many developers adding new features to them... most of these "new features" don't try to rethink how we see and use them. They just extend the feature set instead of stopping and trying to re-think what a map is and what it is supposed to do.
- Boothroid 9y ago
  You don't think there are thousands of people working on exactly this stuff already?! There is deep research into this in academia and the private sector which has been going on for decades :|
VintageCool 9y ago
My searches for food in Bellevue, WA found a Thai restaurant that closed 6 years ago (Tewada Thai), and a Mexican restaurant that left 2 years ago (Tres Hermanos).
- geoelectric 9y ago
  The bugs are about time too.
- dhritzkiv 9y ago
  I noticed that for "lunch", "sandwich", "food" in Toronto as well. Strange, since the demo claims to use the Foursquare API, but the same queries in the app offer better/more relevant results.
aaroninsf 9y ago
As a user, I would prefer two options: • an isochrone preserving relevant geometry geography and transit • a relative time ordering like this, but with the X and Y dimensions subject to change based on my current interests. I.e. I appreciate radius from center as a very useful representation of travel time. But I would liberate X and Y to be things such as rating and cost (to give two likely examples). Once you distort space so you might as well go all-in (in this view) and let it pack in two more dimensions. The resulting clusterings would be very interesting and useful I imagine.
redthrowaway 9y ago
I actually think this is a step too far, conceptually. The isochrone map actually maps better to how I think about travel, and I would find it much more useful.
iamleppert 9y ago
It would be cool if the directionality of the unit circle (northing/heading) changed based upon gyro orientation, when viewed on a mobile device.
johansch 9y ago
A de-cluttered version of this would work great in a car/auto context. "Show me nearby supermarkets"
goodoldboys 9y ago
This is fantastic - both in usefulness and in design. Very well done!
StringyBob 9y ago
A pet project I've wanted to do for ages is to hack up a very high-detail (factoring in every road/footpath) isochrone map centred around my home, using openstreetmap data and render the result for a printshop at e.g. 600dpi to create a high quality map/poster Any suggestions for the best (open) software to achieve this?
- andreigheorghe 9y ago
  not exactly what you're looking for but maybe it gives you some ideas / tools https://www.mapnificent.net/london/#12/51.5005/-0.1283/900/51.5005/-0.1283 https://www.mapnificent.net/london/#12/51.5005/-0.1283/900/5...
- kaikai 9y ago
  Mapbox also does isochrones: https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-application-e9e84a62345f https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-applicat... disclosure: I work for Mapbox (on geocoding, not visual maps)
- vinnieman232 9y ago
  Click on the live link here https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-application-e9e84a62345f https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-applicat... for an example. Use the extension linked in the article to create a high-resolution screenshot from a Mapbox GL Map canvas object. https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/ https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/
shurcooL 9y ago
I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination. Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well. Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining. This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.
- sgustard 9y ago
  Location cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.
  - nevir 9y ago
    I wonder if some sort of projection would help there: expand areas around the points of interest, and compress space between points.
    - geon 9y ago
      Perhaps morphing the physical map to match the time would work?
      - davnicwil 9y ago
        Haven't fully thought it through, but I think such a projection would be unintelligible in most cases - it would probably only look remotely 'intuitive' if travel time would always increase with distance. For a real city, it would likely just be very weirdly morphed blobs of the map all cut up and smushed back together, with bizarrely curved roads, non-aligning roads & train lines, etc.
dionidium 9y ago
It's also kind of interesting that you can draw some pretty strong inferences about neighborhoods once all the geographic cruft is wiped away. For example, from where I'm sitting in Midtown, Manhattan's east-side retail development bias is clearly revealed by a search for "Starbucks:" https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW If you center on the Central West End in St. Louis, you can clearly see that development has mostly happened in the western suburbs: https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK
dgyes 9y ago
I am finding it useful in realizing that some restaurants, stores are actually closer than assumed. This visual removing roads, hills is useful. It would be helpful to be able to toggle a normal map with all points, not just the selected on.
zeppelin101 9y ago
Truly an impressive concept, but I didn't find it to be particularly accurate in Los Angeles. I searched for Mexican food near me and nearly all it could find were Chipotle locations. While I like Chipotle, this isn't quite ready for primetime. Not sure where they're pulling the restaurant data from, but it definitely isn't Google Maps, nor Yelp.
- carlosedp 9y ago
  According to the post they fetch from Foursquare API.
t_serpico 9y ago
+1 for title
tobib 9y ago
Seems like the rate limit of api.foursquare.com has been exceeded.
- lemonlyman516 9y ago
  We're working on it! Check back soon
OlympusMonds 9y ago
I vaguely built something similar for Sydney, but in showing how good/bad public transport is than driving (hint: it's way worse to catch PT): http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/ http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/ It pretty much makes a isochrone maps all over the city, and gets google public transport and driving times and creates a ratio. I've started to work on a better version 2, but so far not much work.
pfarnsworth 9y ago
I had this idea 15 years ago, although I was thinking you could manipulate the visual distance on the map to make it look physically closer, kind of like a topological map. It would take the current traffic, etc to take into account how close things were in time vs distance. But I was never smart enough to implement it. This goes a bit along the way but hopefully someone comes along and implements that, I think I would find it very useful.
nerdponx 9y ago
By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.
- hammock 9y ago
  Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't. In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the second right," etc) I've noticed this a lot, for example when traveling in a third-world country where education is not widespread I know many people outside of cab drivers can't actually read maps. It's something we take for granted in the US. So when my friend was trying to give a local directions to a certain place by pointing to different places on a map, the local wasn't understanding. When I stepped in and provided turn by turn directions pointing on the actual street, away from the map, she understood.
  - wutbrodo 9y ago
    In case it's unclear to anyone reading this, it's not just anecdotal: this has actually been studied http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010702043.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01...
    - deleted 9y ago
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    - Terretta 9y ago
      Or not: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/tu-ssm072012.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/tu-ssm072012... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-008-9448-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-008-9448-9
PascLeRasc 9y ago
I think this is wonderful. I remember when people said talking about how far something is in time units was a "Pittsburgh thing" ;)
amelius 9y ago
Come on, this is just a simple idea with lots of prior art. Nothing to brag about (as the title does) or to build a business around, as anybody can make such maps.
- alex_g 9y ago
  As someone who has never seen this kind of map applied to a relevant use case, I think there's a difference between having designed map like this vs building a tool for everyone to benefit from a map like this.
dcgoss 9y ago
Clever title!
cprayingmantis 9y ago
I like your idea but as vizs go it's a bit misguided. Something 4 rings out in one direction and 5 rings out in another would be hard to compare at a glance. Instead you could make a directionless viz that's basically a bar graph that's just as useful if your primary concern is distance in minutes.
sinaa 9y ago
This is both clever and useful! Is it possible to present a resized version of the route to each path underneath each target? (or perhaps show that on hover) I understand that this would mean having overlapping map snippets of different sizes (with different centres), but some visual representation of the route to take could be nice. Currently, the UX of having to click each target to see the path reduces the usability (having to go back and forth between the suggestions is tedious).
Paradox0 9y ago
The location of the isochrones themselves are a function of time, depending on current traffic levels, when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, etc. Hence, this map can't be static. To really be accurate, it needs to collect that data and auto-refresh itself in short intervals.
k2xl 9y ago
I'm getting 403 responses, hence the map isn't loading for me, anyone have some interesting screenshots of it working?
deleted 9y ago
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wutbrodo 9y ago
This is a really cool idea but the live demo won't load for me when I put an address in. Anyone else getting this to work on Chrome (61.0)/Linux?
Mz 9y ago
I like it and this is cool to see. I have a Certificate in GIS and did some reading at one time about the inherent challenges involved in dealing with time in data visualization. This seems to be a fairly elegant solution. In city centers with a lot of walking traffic, you may see maps overlaid with progressively larger circles, to estimate travel time based on simple physical distance. But this assumes that people move like crows fly: that there’s a straight-line road for anywhere we want to go, through concrete walls and over lakes, without traffic ever to slow us down. In an urban setting, none of these are practical assumptions to make. That isn't limited to urban settings. They are not practical assumptions to make in any setting.
quickthrower2 9y ago
If you only care about time then direction is irrelevant. In which case just listing the restaurants in order of travel time would be better. What would be cool is instead of time you have a score that takes into account time, cost (do I need an uber or will a bus do?) and variance (traffic delay probability)
rkuykendall-com 9y ago
This is going to be fantastic for upper Manhattan. Google Maps / Yelp don't understand that going north-south in Manhattan is so much easier than going east/west. A place can be 10x further away in miles, but still be easier and faster to get to.
rodolphoarruda 9y ago
Refreshed my memory about when I was calling this "mobility circles" back in 2011. http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-circulos-da-mobilidade.html http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-circulos-d... (portuguese)
amai 9y ago
I want to see such a map around every apartment for rent.
EGreg 9y ago
Why not just have a list sorted by distance or that same travel time? The concentric circles seem to make it more difficult to browse. For an example, go to https://groups.do https://groups.do , create an account (can be fake) and then click New Group, select some Dining activity and see the restaurants pop up sorted by distance. Done.
crooked-v 9y ago
This is a cool idea, but what about combining it with public transit? In my city, the bus and light rail lines affect my decision-making in all kinds of weird ways. For example: - Going a few miles east (on the light rail line) is much, much faster than the same distance plus a mile north or south. - Some places on the inner east side of the river take me longer to get to than places further out that are on a bus line. - Going to the northwest part downtown takes me longer than going to the north part, even though they're both the same distance from home, because the transit lines run in an ⅂ shape.
deleted 9y ago
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erikb 9y ago
I've met with people from the Berlin mapbox team and feel they are a nice bunch. However this map idea also reflects my core impression. Really smart people that provide constant high quality content (just look at the blog itself, how it's designed, and the other posts), but not really a disruptive spirit. Sie sind nicht der Elefant im Porzelanladen, you could say. That is their strength and their weakness.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  "You are not the elephant in a cupboard full of porcelain", that means, by the way.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    In the US we might say "you are not a bull in a china shop," which is in the same spirit.
sirmike_ 9y ago
Personally this is not how I think about this kind of concept divorced from the geography. But am glad there are tools to help express how I want to use GIS info! https://boundlessgeo.com/ https://boundlessgeo.com/ is a highly customizable open source suite for GIS data as well.
reaperducer 9y ago
Good for initial decision making, but worthless for actually helping someone get somewhere, which is the function of a map. Perhaps this needs a different name.
TearsInTheRain 9y ago
I have been waiting for something like this for housing searches. Suprisingly hard to search within a specific commute time rather than search by neighborhood
DonHopkins 9y ago
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Chris Lightfoot's beautiful interactive time travel maps that he did with MySociety and Stamen Design: http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html MySociety Travel Time Maps Interactive maps of travel time and housing prices in London MySociety, an NGO which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, came to Stamen with a remit to explore two fascinating datasets: median prices of homes throughout London, and the time it takes to travel from one place to another throughout the city. https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-and-their-uses/ https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-a... https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/ https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/ Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 — 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot Sometimes, it’s more useful to know a journey time than it is to know the distance. That’s why people often refer to ‘an hour’s commute’ rather than ‘40 miles’. Mapumental is a beautiful tool to show public transport travel times, from or to a chosen postcode, on a timebanded map. These can be embedded in websites, apps or online tools, or used for internal research purposes. Transit-time maps, also known as isochrone maps, are not a new idea: there are examples dating back hundreds of years. But the online technologies behind Mapumental are new – and have unleashed a great many possibilities for all kinds of users. https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/ https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/ Mapumental developed the project (site currently down for maintainance): http://www.mapumental.com/ http://www.mapumental.com/ Stamen Design has done lots of really cool stuff with maps: http://v1.stamen.com/ http://v1.stamen.com/
sytelus 9y ago
This is good idea but could be done differently. One major issue is that time is not only the optimization criteria. For example, if there are two places both 30 minutes away but one requires me to take tons of turns through narrow streets while other is straight forward highway driving then I would chose the later. Hack I would later even if cost was 25% more. Others may have some other criteria, for example, eating near river shore instead of in dirty back alley. The bottom line is that you can't just throwaway physical maps. One way to marry your idea in physical may might be to color code places according to how far they are.
padobson 9y ago
I'd like to see a version of this where you can input a list of errands - work, groceries, daycare, gas, gym - and it distills all the travel into a single dot. You pick the dot with the least amount of time and it gives you a list of locations in the order you should travel.
npsimons 9y ago
Something similar, but simpler: https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm Very useful in constraining a search area based on how far you're willing to commute when looking for a home.
alphaalpha101 9y ago
I think this would be far more useful as an overlay over a physical map than just entirely replacing one. By that, I mean.. think of isobars.
brosky117 9y ago
I've never seen an isochronic map before. Those are legit!
graphememes 9y ago
It looks like a step backward from it's "prior art" that was installed in Oakland.
opportune 9y ago
As a user, I would find an isochronic map much more useful than the weird radial design they want to provide. To provide the level of precision that the radial map does without destroying our eyes with colors, they could substitute a color gradient with some sort of border around "reference times" such as 5 minutes. The author thinks that the time-only maps address the root concern, which is "how fast can I get somewhere." But that's not entirely true: there are areas where I live that I would rather go to than others. If I search for sushi and I see one place in a crime-ridden neighborhood, a second place in the middle of nowhere, and a third place in the "trendy" section of my city where most of the rest of the food is good, I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent).
- HeavyStorm 9y ago
  Just a cool thing to notice: > I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent). By distance, you probably meant time to get there.
justifier 9y ago
I worked in a hostel for years and Europeans often noted how funny it was that people from the states referred to distance in regards to time ie, an 8 hour drive, or 20 minute walk It was always fun to sit around and speculate as to why
- toomanybeersies 9y ago
  I do that here in New Zealand for driving. It doesn't really mean much to say that a town is 200 km away. That 200 km could take anywhere from 2 hours to 3.5 hours to drive to, depending on the road and terrain. The distance isn't actually very relevant. The tourist guides here specifically mention this, that don't plan your travel by distance, because 100 km in one place is not 100 km in another. In the old road maps, they'd have a travel time matrix, rather than distance (like this [0] except with times) [0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05ed87720db9d6fc78df773f6b1ac569953eb.gif?1483922525 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05e...
xahrepap 9y ago
A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..." Constant. Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.
- askvictor 9y ago
  Why not just set navigation audio to alerts only (at least in Google maps)
  - mos_basik 9y ago
    I use Waze on my daily commute not because I don't know the way to work, but because I would like to be routed around traffic as well as possible. Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But, if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when it starts finding a new route. Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.
- rrobukef 9y ago
  GPS should have an option to be silent until I deviate from the route. Or be silent if I frequently travel this road (for example at least twice this month)
sengork 9y ago
Interesting to see Melbourne Australia in some of the maps.
wyatte 9y ago
"By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Oh my.... They just invented the 'list'. Or better yet a list that drives map interactions....oh my and an ordered list too! I could swear I did that like 10 years ago on google maps, but I guess it must have just been a dream. Seriously, adding a fancy radius dial overlay doesn't really improve much over a plain old ordered list.
sixdimensional 9y ago
I love this kind of thinking. I've always wondered even further about this - how you take this and extend it to 3 dimensions + time. In terms of maps, that would also help you with elevation or other obstacles that might slow you down from a straight line path. Certainly, with the processing power and capacity today, we have the capability of knowing not only the two dimensional direction and the time it takes, but even the three dimensional position plus time. I like to think of this crazy idea like a 3-D video recorder (maybe)... something that records positions of all objects in the specified space in slices of time, and can reconstruct any such slice and analyze the relative position of objects in space over time to each other. I am not sure how such a technology would be made... capturing all the positions of everything in slices of time. I think we can do it with 3-D simulations, but not sure how we could record such data for the real world without modeling it in the virtual. Still, this is such a cool direction and I for one like seeing people experimenting with something that we take for granted so easily, the map. I feel like everything that is amazing about time and space is somehow embodied by maps - astronomy, time, geography, relativity, etc.
dlandis 9y ago
It kind of reminds me of what Uber decided to do in their UberEats app, which is organize restaurants by how long delivery will take and not say anything about how many miles away the restaurant is or what its address is. You can't sort by distance or display a map. So it ends up being really annoying if you would rather deal with nearby restaurants you end up doing a lot of flipping back and forth from google.
bradknowles 9y ago
Not too bad, but the search needs to be less literal. When I search for "sandwich", my neighborhood Subway should show up, even though the word doesn't appear in the name. When I search for "convenience" or "store", my neighborhood convenience store should show up, even though those words do not appear in the name. But I did discover a Whole Foods location that is even closer to my house than the three others in town that I knew of. Cool!
- flachsechs 9y ago
  this isn't a question of being less literal, it's a question of building a search taxonomy and synonym database and tuning it for relevance, in this case, in the restaurants vertical. this is something a lot of people don't realize about search engines i.e. yelp, angie's, etc. - they are tuned to fit the humans to the data, not vice versa.
pinot 9y ago
Searching for pho gets you photography... kind of annoying :)
alanbernstein 9y ago
I've had a similar concept rattling around in my head for a while. Rather than basing the time on travel distance from a point, you can base it on travel distance from a route. Then results can be ranked by "on my home commute, how far out of my way is this place?"
piinbinary 9y ago
For food, I'd like a map that allows me to minimize the sum of time spent traveling and time spent waiting in line.
TheCoreh 9y ago
Really interesting that the "time distance" is more or less linear with walking/biking, but in a car it has a non linear relationship: For further places you take a highway, which requires some extra distance but adds a significant speed boost. Having the dots shift in position when changing modes of transportation was really insightful.
abpavel 9y ago
In .. 7 .. minutes you wi reach your deatination .. in shady alley behind the dumpster. But hey, it's close! Cool idea though.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I haven't heard much about Mapbox before. Where do they get their data? Do they buy it from another company or actually do the mapping themselves?
nnain 9y ago
I like that there're companies like Mapbox and CityMapper challenging Google Maps and Apple Maps. But giving a blank slate to a user and having them input a text query when they open the App might not be the best idea. In my head I remember the places around me using landmarks; the blank screen at the start makes me impatient.
lkbainbridge 9y ago
It’s a really cool visual, but not too practical for points of interest searching on websites with more than a few points, although good if density is low and travel time area is small. Take a look at TravelTime platform that can do 1000s of points in milliseconds - here’s an example using the TravelTime API for the same location and you can drag the marker about and it quickly recalculates points of interest or expand it out up to 90 mins journey time. https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929&0_tt=15&0_time=d1506011559544&0_title=1st%20Ave%2C%20Seattle%2C%20Washington%2098121%2C%20United%20States&0_lat=47.61466&poi=shop https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929...
karmakaze 9y ago
City Block distance metric aka Taxicab geometry applies here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry
xg15 9y ago
The idea has something, but I'd hesitate to call something that completely changes depending on on when, where and by whom it is viewed a map at all. This is a nice tool to answer the descision-making question "where can I find a good restaurant to get to in reasonable proximity?" that the article talked about - but I'm worried about the undertones in it that were equating it to an actual map. I'm not sure if that's their idea but if they are thinking about using this to replace geographical maps, they should stop that thought quickly - there is an awful lot of information that a geographical map gives you that this doesn't.
mholmes680 9y ago
Its cool, and I can see the usefulness. After I used it for 5 mins I started thinking "hey I really could care less which direction I need to travel for lunch anyways", so its doing its stated goal there. My only issue is that they define it as a "map". Its, well, its not. Its a useful tool, but a map tells you how to go there, and this is not that (until you click on something, so that second piece is a map fine). I can concede its a map in the sense that multiple places plotted are still direction-ally related to each other, but that's counter to going ahead and throwing out the map-streets in the first place.
joelanman 9y ago
not sure whether this gives much advantage over just listing the results in order of travel time? It gives an indication of direction, but is that really useful?

968 points by uptown 9y ago

I love this idea, and also its acknowledgement of prior time maps for rail and other psychogeographic forebears. Its ability to put in relevant data in rational time-based space stops some of those issues that make us take a longer or particular direction because of habit, fear, or misunderstanding of the timespace about us. Nonetheless as a map-lover, I'd love to see how more contextual information could be added for serendipitous and geographical observation.

iamben 9y ago

This is absolutely amazing. If I could use this with a more intelligent search (pub / bar return different things, for instance - whereas I want to search for "places I can get a beer"), this would be fantastic.

baccredited 9y ago
Agree. Show me a time map for nearby draft beers with Beer Advocate or Ratebeer scores and I would use this all the time. Bonus points to restrict to certain styles like IPA, lagers, etc. Untappd could actually do this if they wanted.

rmdundon 9y ago

Interesting concept. I like the overlay idea, but I think simply having that as a standalone map would not be useful in other areas where distance as the crow flies ≠ time traveled. Areas with large bodies of water (like adjacent peninsulas), mountainous areas or areas with strange road infrastructure (Some parts of Virginia). Nonetheless, an interesting concept!

zwily 9y ago
My impression is that the distance is not "as a crow flies". It's distance given the mode of travel you specify.
lemonlyman516 9y ago
The distance changes as you change your mode of transportation - so barriers would be taken into account for the time traveled.

microcolonel 9y ago

I wonder how it would look if you directly distorted the map by travel time.

qznc 9y ago
This. I was hoping for some weird pictures of distorted maps.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  For what it's worth, I think it would be computationally quite hard. You would have to pick a set of points and maybe isomap them from three dimensions (x, y, and time) to two, then find a visually acceptable cage transformation using those points as anchors. You'd have to do this for each query.
  - ctdonath 9y ago
    Alternative would be to keep the standard geographic map, but have clear points on all possible destinations X minutes away - ideally with a slider, watching the "X minutes" points slide around. Actually pretty easy, given each road segment knowing expected speed, and "X+1" just extending into untraveled areas.
    - jamessb 9y ago
      There are many interactive isochrone maps with sliders - one such example is [1]. Other isochrone maps listed here [2] may also have time sliders. [1]: http://property.mapumental.com http://property.mapumental.com [2]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Isochrone#Examples https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Isochrone#Examples
      - ctdonath 9y ago
        They're all public transit. I'm looking for general roads, re: "I'm here, where can I drive to in 35 minutes?"

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

It'd be cool to see a similar map at relativistic scales that shows the relationship between travel time for different speeds and the elapsed time at the origin and destination.

arafalov 9y ago

I would love a distance map that includes public transport travel time. For example, if I live close to metro/subway/train and I want to do really big grocery shopping. It would be interesting to see the nearest grocery that includes those I could reach by jumping on the metro and with minimal total walking. It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own neighborhood.

forrestthewoods 9y ago
I wrote a tool that kinda does that. It shows how far you can travel by different modes of transport, including public transit. It also work with time of day to account for both bus schedules and traffic. https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-times-378009330ffa https://blog.forrestthewoods.com/visualizing-commute-times-3...
roywiggins 9y ago
Not quite, but it will show you an area within X minutes of transit from a given location. https://www.mapnificent.net https://www.mapnificent.net
jka 9y ago
Applied to the maps in the article, this could end up introducing animation to the chart. If your local light rail arrives every 30 minutes, then your ETA to arrive at various different grocery stores is gradually changing, drawing nearer to the center, and climbs up a steep (half hour) cliff when you aren't close enough to the station to catch the train. You could even colour the destinations by level of urgency - blue for destinations where you can casually stroll to the station, or red for ones where you really need to leave right away to catch the train.
avel 9y ago
Also check out https://citymapper.com https://citymapper.com for something close to what you describe.

munro 9y ago

I wonder if it would be readable to overlay the distance map with the street map, and connect the two with a line.

wavefunction 9y ago
Or connect the paths along sidewalks etc that will get you there in the claimed time.

udfalkso 9y ago

Very neat idea! I can't seem to run a search in my location in NY. "Find Me" changes the address but the results are stuck in Seattle. I can't seem to change the query term either.

panic 9y ago

This is really cool! I wonder what the other boundaries on the map (road, neighborhood, city, etc.) would look like when projected onto the time view.

hnnsj 9y ago

How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure out how to get there.

peatmoss 9y ago
If you were interested in trip chaining, you could still pick the direction you wanted to head.
- peteretep 9y ago
  The map doesn't guarantee that at all. Two items on the map can appear next to each other and take a very long time to get between -- perhaps they're separated by a freeway that you can't cross, for example.
  - dhritzkiv 9y ago
    I feel that should be accounted for in the time it takes to reach that location, and therefore its place on the map.
    - jdminhbg 9y ago
      Imagine a long river with a bridge at the point you are currently located, but no other bridges. Two places across from the river from each other might each be an hour away, but two hours apart from each other because you have to come back to your current location to cross the river. They'd look nearby on this map because they're in close places and similar times to get to.
      - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
        This is actually an extremely common case with public transportation: There are two channels of buses going N-S in the city, and both channels meet downtown. From downtown, two locations can be about equally distant in travel time northwards, and nearby in E-W distance compared to their N-S displacement, but they're separated by a freeway and lie on different N-S channels, and so the E-W distance takes as long to commute (by foot or transit) as going downtown and back northwards would.

wavefunction 9y ago

Removing the geography seems great until you are trying to cross rivers or highways.

Nagyman 9y ago
This map isn't for navigating to the place in mind; it's more of a discovery tool based on travel time. Pick a place and then you get a standard geography based map.
danso 9y ago
Ostensibly, these kind of maps imply the time-cost of those obstacles more accurately than a standard map in which as-the-bird-flies distances are more explicitly shown.
chippy 9y ago
It does account for it, but only for one starting point. So the spatial relationship of the objects to each other mean less than the relationship of the objects independently with the starting position (the centre). A user would have to do it multiple times manually, or specify some kind of travelling salesman route to figure out the best way. I think our brains do this more efficiently and quickly but this would really be worth looking into with this new map.

sulam 9y ago

Isochronic maps are pretty awesome. However, an isochrone-only projection that ignores geography is prone to the same sort of errors that the alternative creates. One simple example that is personal to me -- when I moved from SF to the East Bay, my commute into the city shortened by ~10 minutes because of where I'd been living (out by Ocean Beach) vs where I moved to and the nature of driving and public transit in the SF Bay Area. And yet as far as my friends who lived and worked in SF were concerned, I was now in this mystical place that they didn't really spend any time in or know much about (the perception of Oakland is also contributing here). It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up feeling kind of close. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new-economic-megaregions-map/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-revea...

Sniffnoy 9y ago

Of course, distance on this map corresponds to travel time only so long as one of the points is the center; for a multi-leg trip, it still essentially requires manual inquiry and comparison.

danso 9y ago

Pretty neat. I frequently use the example of Yelp's list and map views as an example of how maps aren't always better, even as they are more appealing compared to a text list. But I frequently use the list view because I can sort by distance, while still seeing the other important info (such as star rating, cost, food type). But distance isn't the only important geospatial factor. Frequently I want to find a place to eat/drink that's on the way to another destination (such as a movie theater). This kind of chrono map would be more useful in a new city in which I don't know that a place 0.2 mi away to the west involves crossing an interstate. In a setting I'm familiar with, it's probably not particularly useful on mobile (given the limited dimensions for showing points and text labels), but could be great on print displays. It'd allow designers to show geospatial/time info without also having to render a full map. On the topic of Yelp and other listing services, maybe some refinements could be made to make lists more geospatially useful. No reason why the list view has to show just distance, rather than time traveled. Or to include a filter option for direction, so that I can just see things west or south of me. It's pretty frustrating sometimes having to switch back and forth between list and map.

npolet 9y ago

This is a pretty neat idea, and I could see myself using this in day to day life. It's nice to see real thought, study and execution into new ways of portraying things that have the possibility of becoming stale. While maps and their functionalities are very much "still in development" with many developers adding new features to them... most of these "new features" don't try to rethink how we see and use them. They just extend the feature set instead of stopping and trying to re-think what a map is and what it is supposed to do.

Boothroid 9y ago
You don't think there are thousands of people working on exactly this stuff already?! There is deep research into this in academia and the private sector which has been going on for decades :|

VintageCool 9y ago

My searches for food in Bellevue, WA found a Thai restaurant that closed 6 years ago (Tewada Thai), and a Mexican restaurant that left 2 years ago (Tres Hermanos).

geoelectric 9y ago
The bugs are about time too.
dhritzkiv 9y ago
I noticed that for "lunch", "sandwich", "food" in Toronto as well. Strange, since the demo claims to use the Foursquare API, but the same queries in the app offer better/more relevant results.

aaroninsf 9y ago

As a user, I would prefer two options: • an isochrone preserving relevant geometry geography and transit • a relative time ordering like this, but with the X and Y dimensions subject to change based on my current interests. I.e. I appreciate radius from center as a very useful representation of travel time. But I would liberate X and Y to be things such as rating and cost (to give two likely examples). Once you distort space so you might as well go all-in (in this view) and let it pack in two more dimensions. The resulting clusterings would be very interesting and useful I imagine.

redthrowaway 9y ago

I actually think this is a step too far, conceptually. The isochrone map actually maps better to how I think about travel, and I would find it much more useful.

iamleppert 9y ago

It would be cool if the directionality of the unit circle (northing/heading) changed based upon gyro orientation, when viewed on a mobile device.

johansch 9y ago

A de-cluttered version of this would work great in a car/auto context. "Show me nearby supermarkets"

goodoldboys 9y ago

This is fantastic - both in usefulness and in design. Very well done!

StringyBob 9y ago

A pet project I've wanted to do for ages is to hack up a very high-detail (factoring in every road/footpath) isochrone map centred around my home, using openstreetmap data and render the result for a printshop at e.g. 600dpi to create a high quality map/poster Any suggestions for the best (open) software to achieve this?

andreigheorghe 9y ago
not exactly what you're looking for but maybe it gives you some ideas / tools https://www.mapnificent.net/london/#12/51.5005/-0.1283/900/51.5005/-0.1283 https://www.mapnificent.net/london/#12/51.5005/-0.1283/900/5...
kaikai 9y ago
Mapbox also does isochrones: https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-application-e9e84a62345f https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-applicat... disclosure: I work for Mapbox (on geocoding, not visual maps)
vinnieman232 9y ago
Click on the live link here https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-application-e9e84a62345f https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-applicat... for an example. Use the extension linked in the article to create a high-resolution screenshot from a Mapbox GL Map canvas object. https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/ https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/

shurcooL 9y ago

I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a destination. Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware of the physical directions as well. Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining. This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to take away from how good it already is.

sgustard 9y ago
Location cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.
- nevir 9y ago
  I wonder if some sort of projection would help there: expand areas around the points of interest, and compress space between points.
  - geon 9y ago
    Perhaps morphing the physical map to match the time would work?
    - davnicwil 9y ago
      Haven't fully thought it through, but I think such a projection would be unintelligible in most cases - it would probably only look remotely 'intuitive' if travel time would always increase with distance. For a real city, it would likely just be very weirdly morphed blobs of the map all cut up and smushed back together, with bizarrely curved roads, non-aligning roads & train lines, etc.

dionidium 9y ago

It's also kind of interesting that you can draw some pretty strong inferences about neighborhoods once all the geographic cruft is wiped away. For example, from where I'm sitting in Midtown, Manhattan's east-side retail development bias is clearly revealed by a search for "Starbucks:" https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW If you center on the Central West End in St. Louis, you can clearly see that development has mostly happened in the western suburbs: https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK

dgyes 9y ago

I am finding it useful in realizing that some restaurants, stores are actually closer than assumed. This visual removing roads, hills is useful. It would be helpful to be able to toggle a normal map with all points, not just the selected on.

zeppelin101 9y ago

Truly an impressive concept, but I didn't find it to be particularly accurate in Los Angeles. I searched for Mexican food near me and nearly all it could find were Chipotle locations. While I like Chipotle, this isn't quite ready for primetime. Not sure where they're pulling the restaurant data from, but it definitely isn't Google Maps, nor Yelp.

carlosedp 9y ago
According to the post they fetch from Foursquare API.

t_serpico 9y ago

+1 for title

tobib 9y ago

Seems like the rate limit of api.foursquare.com has been exceeded.

lemonlyman516 9y ago
We're working on it! Check back soon

OlympusMonds 9y ago

I vaguely built something similar for Sydney, but in showing how good/bad public transport is than driving (hint: it's way worse to catch PT): http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/ http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/ It pretty much makes a isochrone maps all over the city, and gets google public transport and driving times and creates a ratio. I've started to work on a better version 2, but so far not much work.

pfarnsworth 9y ago

I had this idea 15 years ago, although I was thinking you could manipulate the visual distance on the map to make it look physically closer, kind of like a topological map. It would take the current traffic, etc to take into account how close things were in time vs distance. But I was never smart enough to implement it. This goes a bit along the way but hopefully someone comes along and implements that, I think I would find it very useful.

nerdponx 9y ago

By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the actual geography.

hammock 9y ago
Imo when it comes to that there is a huge difference between men and women, or perhaps more accurately people who are highly skilled in map-reading vs people who aren't. In general men prefer to navigate using a map, cardinal directions and can adapt their routefinding on the fly (the actual geography); women prefer to navigate using turn-by-turn directions and fixed landmarks ("five minutes that way," "make the second right," etc) I've noticed this a lot, for example when traveling in a third-world country where education is not widespread I know many people outside of cab drivers can't actually read maps. It's something we take for granted in the US. So when my friend was trying to give a local directions to a certain place by pointing to different places on a map, the local wasn't understanding. When I stepped in and provided turn by turn directions pointing on the actual street, away from the map, she understood.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  In case it's unclear to anyone reading this, it's not just anecdotal: this has actually been studied http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010702043.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Terretta 9y ago
    Or not: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/tu-ssm072012.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-07/tu-ssm072012... https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-008-9448-9 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-008-9448-9

PascLeRasc 9y ago

I think this is wonderful. I remember when people said talking about how far something is in time units was a "Pittsburgh thing" ;)

amelius 9y ago

Come on, this is just a simple idea with lots of prior art. Nothing to brag about (as the title does) or to build a business around, as anybody can make such maps.

alex_g 9y ago
As someone who has never seen this kind of map applied to a relevant use case, I think there's a difference between having designed map like this vs building a tool for everyone to benefit from a map like this.

dcgoss 9y ago

Clever title!

cprayingmantis 9y ago

I like your idea but as vizs go it's a bit misguided. Something 4 rings out in one direction and 5 rings out in another would be hard to compare at a glance. Instead you could make a directionless viz that's basically a bar graph that's just as useful if your primary concern is distance in minutes.

sinaa 9y ago

This is both clever and useful! Is it possible to present a resized version of the route to each path underneath each target? (or perhaps show that on hover) I understand that this would mean having overlapping map snippets of different sizes (with different centres), but some visual representation of the route to take could be nice. Currently, the UX of having to click each target to see the path reduces the usability (having to go back and forth between the suggestions is tedious).

Paradox0 9y ago

The location of the isochrones themselves are a function of time, depending on current traffic levels, when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, etc. Hence, this map can't be static. To really be accurate, it needs to collect that data and auto-refresh itself in short intervals.

k2xl 9y ago

I'm getting 403 responses, hence the map isn't loading for me, anyone have some interesting screenshots of it working?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wutbrodo 9y ago

This is a really cool idea but the live demo won't load for me when I put an address in. Anyone else getting this to work on Chrome (61.0)/Linux?

Mz 9y ago

I like it and this is cool to see. I have a Certificate in GIS and did some reading at one time about the inherent challenges involved in dealing with time in data visualization. This seems to be a fairly elegant solution. In city centers with a lot of walking traffic, you may see maps overlaid with progressively larger circles, to estimate travel time based on simple physical distance. But this assumes that people move like crows fly: that there’s a straight-line road for anywhere we want to go, through concrete walls and over lakes, without traffic ever to slow us down. In an urban setting, none of these are practical assumptions to make. That isn't limited to urban settings. They are not practical assumptions to make in any setting.

quickthrower2 9y ago

If you only care about time then direction is irrelevant. In which case just listing the restaurants in order of travel time would be better. What would be cool is instead of time you have a score that takes into account time, cost (do I need an uber or will a bus do?) and variance (traffic delay probability)

rkuykendall-com 9y ago

This is going to be fantastic for upper Manhattan. Google Maps / Yelp don't understand that going north-south in Manhattan is so much easier than going east/west. A place can be 10x further away in miles, but still be easier and faster to get to.

rodolphoarruda 9y ago

Refreshed my memory about when I was calling this "mobility circles" back in 2011. http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-circulos-da-mobilidade.html http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-circulos-d... (portuguese)

amai 9y ago

I want to see such a map around every apartment for rent.

EGreg 9y ago

Why not just have a list sorted by distance or that same travel time? The concentric circles seem to make it more difficult to browse. For an example, go to https://groups.do https://groups.do , create an account (can be fake) and then click New Group, select some Dining activity and see the restaurants pop up sorted by distance. Done.

crooked-v 9y ago

This is a cool idea, but what about combining it with public transit? In my city, the bus and light rail lines affect my decision-making in all kinds of weird ways. For example: - Going a few miles east (on the light rail line) is much, much faster than the same distance plus a mile north or south. - Some places on the inner east side of the river take me longer to get to than places further out that are on a bus line. - Going to the northwest part downtown takes me longer than going to the north part, even though they're both the same distance from home, because the transit lines run in an ⅂ shape.

deleted 9y ago

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erikb 9y ago

I've met with people from the Berlin mapbox team and feel they are a nice bunch. However this map idea also reflects my core impression. Really smart people that provide constant high quality content (just look at the blog itself, how it's designed, and the other posts), but not really a disruptive spirit. Sie sind nicht der Elefant im Porzelanladen, you could say. That is their strength and their weakness.

lucb1e 9y ago
"You are not the elephant in a cupboard full of porcelain", that means, by the way.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  In the US we might say "you are not a bull in a china shop," which is in the same spirit.

sirmike_ 9y ago

Personally this is not how I think about this kind of concept divorced from the geography. But am glad there are tools to help express how I want to use GIS info! https://boundlessgeo.com/ https://boundlessgeo.com/ is a highly customizable open source suite for GIS data as well.

reaperducer 9y ago

Good for initial decision making, but worthless for actually helping someone get somewhere, which is the function of a map. Perhaps this needs a different name.

TearsInTheRain 9y ago

I have been waiting for something like this for housing searches. Suprisingly hard to search within a specific commute time rather than search by neighborhood

DonHopkins 9y ago

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Chris Lightfoot's beautiful interactive time travel maps that he did with MySociety and Stamen Design: http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html MySociety Travel Time Maps Interactive maps of travel time and housing prices in London MySociety, an NGO which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, came to Stamen with a remit to explore two fascinating datasets: median prices of homes throughout London, and the time it takes to travel from one place to another throughout the city. https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-and-their-uses/ https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-a... https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/ https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/ Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 — 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot Sometimes, it’s more useful to know a journey time than it is to know the distance. That’s why people often refer to ‘an hour’s commute’ rather than ‘40 miles’. Mapumental is a beautiful tool to show public transport travel times, from or to a chosen postcode, on a timebanded map. These can be embedded in websites, apps or online tools, or used for internal research purposes. Transit-time maps, also known as isochrone maps, are not a new idea: there are examples dating back hundreds of years. But the online technologies behind Mapumental are new – and have unleashed a great many possibilities for all kinds of users. https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/ https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/ Mapumental developed the project (site currently down for maintainance): http://www.mapumental.com/ http://www.mapumental.com/ Stamen Design has done lots of really cool stuff with maps: http://v1.stamen.com/ http://v1.stamen.com/

sytelus 9y ago

This is good idea but could be done differently. One major issue is that time is not only the optimization criteria. For example, if there are two places both 30 minutes away but one requires me to take tons of turns through narrow streets while other is straight forward highway driving then I would chose the later. Hack I would later even if cost was 25% more. Others may have some other criteria, for example, eating near river shore instead of in dirty back alley. The bottom line is that you can't just throwaway physical maps. One way to marry your idea in physical may might be to color code places according to how far they are.

padobson 9y ago

I'd like to see a version of this where you can input a list of errands - work, groceries, daycare, gas, gym - and it distills all the travel into a single dot. You pick the dot with the least amount of time and it gives you a list of locations in the order you should travel.

npsimons 9y ago

Something similar, but simpler: https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm Very useful in constraining a search area based on how far you're willing to commute when looking for a home.

alphaalpha101 9y ago

I think this would be far more useful as an overlay over a physical map than just entirely replacing one. By that, I mean.. think of isobars.

brosky117 9y ago

I've never seen an isochronic map before. Those are legit!

graphememes 9y ago

It looks like a step backward from it's "prior art" that was installed in Oakland.

opportune 9y ago

As a user, I would find an isochronic map much more useful than the weird radial design they want to provide. To provide the level of precision that the radial map does without destroying our eyes with colors, they could substitute a color gradient with some sort of border around "reference times" such as 5 minutes. The author thinks that the time-only maps address the root concern, which is "how fast can I get somewhere." But that's not entirely true: there are areas where I live that I would rather go to than others. If I search for sushi and I see one place in a crime-ridden neighborhood, a second place in the middle of nowhere, and a third place in the "trendy" section of my city where most of the rest of the food is good, I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent).

HeavyStorm 9y ago
Just a cool thing to notice: > I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent). By distance, you probably meant time to get there.

justifier 9y ago

I worked in a hostel for years and Europeans often noted how funny it was that people from the states referred to distance in regards to time ie, an 8 hour drive, or 20 minute walk It was always fun to sit around and speculate as to why

toomanybeersies 9y ago
I do that here in New Zealand for driving. It doesn't really mean much to say that a town is 200 km away. That 200 km could take anywhere from 2 hours to 3.5 hours to drive to, depending on the road and terrain. The distance isn't actually very relevant. The tourist guides here specifically mention this, that don't plan your travel by distance, because 100 km in one place is not 100 km in another. In the old road maps, they'd have a travel time matrix, rather than distance (like this [0] except with times) [0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05ed87720db9d6fc78df773f6b1ac569953eb.gif?1483922525 https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05e...

xahrepap 9y ago

A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..." Constant. Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.

askvictor 9y ago
Why not just set navigation audio to alerts only (at least in Google maps)
- mos_basik 9y ago
  I use Waze on my daily commute not because I don't know the way to work, but because I would like to be routed around traffic as well as possible. Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But, if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when it starts finding a new route. Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.
rrobukef 9y ago
GPS should have an option to be silent until I deviate from the route. Or be silent if I frequently travel this road (for example at least twice this month)

sengork 9y ago

Interesting to see Melbourne Australia in some of the maps.

wyatte 9y ago

"By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes that way” versus “ten minutes the other.” Oh my.... They just invented the 'list'. Or better yet a list that drives map interactions....oh my and an ordered list too! I could swear I did that like 10 years ago on google maps, but I guess it must have just been a dream. Seriously, adding a fancy radius dial overlay doesn't really improve much over a plain old ordered list.

sixdimensional 9y ago

I love this kind of thinking. I've always wondered even further about this - how you take this and extend it to 3 dimensions + time. In terms of maps, that would also help you with elevation or other obstacles that might slow you down from a straight line path. Certainly, with the processing power and capacity today, we have the capability of knowing not only the two dimensional direction and the time it takes, but even the three dimensional position plus time. I like to think of this crazy idea like a 3-D video recorder (maybe)... something that records positions of all objects in the specified space in slices of time, and can reconstruct any such slice and analyze the relative position of objects in space over time to each other. I am not sure how such a technology would be made... capturing all the positions of everything in slices of time. I think we can do it with 3-D simulations, but not sure how we could record such data for the real world without modeling it in the virtual. Still, this is such a cool direction and I for one like seeing people experimenting with something that we take for granted so easily, the map. I feel like everything that is amazing about time and space is somehow embodied by maps - astronomy, time, geography, relativity, etc.

dlandis 9y ago

It kind of reminds me of what Uber decided to do in their UberEats app, which is organize restaurants by how long delivery will take and not say anything about how many miles away the restaurant is or what its address is. You can't sort by distance or display a map. So it ends up being really annoying if you would rather deal with nearby restaurants you end up doing a lot of flipping back and forth from google.

bradknowles 9y ago

Not too bad, but the search needs to be less literal. When I search for "sandwich", my neighborhood Subway should show up, even though the word doesn't appear in the name. When I search for "convenience" or "store", my neighborhood convenience store should show up, even though those words do not appear in the name. But I did discover a Whole Foods location that is even closer to my house than the three others in town that I knew of. Cool!

flachsechs 9y ago
this isn't a question of being less literal, it's a question of building a search taxonomy and synonym database and tuning it for relevance, in this case, in the restaurants vertical. this is something a lot of people don't realize about search engines i.e. yelp, angie's, etc. - they are tuned to fit the humans to the data, not vice versa.

pinot 9y ago

Searching for pho gets you photography... kind of annoying :)

alanbernstein 9y ago

I've had a similar concept rattling around in my head for a while. Rather than basing the time on travel distance from a point, you can base it on travel distance from a route. Then results can be ranked by "on my home commute, how far out of my way is this place?"

piinbinary 9y ago

For food, I'd like a map that allows me to minimize the sum of time spent traveling and time spent waiting in line.

TheCoreh 9y ago

Really interesting that the "time distance" is more or less linear with walking/biking, but in a car it has a non linear relationship: For further places you take a highway, which requires some extra distance but adds a significant speed boost. Having the dots shift in position when changing modes of transportation was really insightful.

abpavel 9y ago

In .. 7 .. minutes you wi reach your deatination .. in shady alley behind the dumpster. But hey, it's close! Cool idea though.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I haven't heard much about Mapbox before. Where do they get their data? Do they buy it from another company or actually do the mapping themselves?

nnain 9y ago

I like that there're companies like Mapbox and CityMapper challenging Google Maps and Apple Maps. But giving a blank slate to a user and having them input a text query when they open the App might not be the best idea. In my head I remember the places around me using landmarks; the blank screen at the start makes me impatient.

lkbainbridge 9y ago

It’s a really cool visual, but not too practical for points of interest searching on websites with more than a few points, although good if density is low and travel time area is small. Take a look at TravelTime platform that can do 1000s of points in milliseconds - here’s an example using the TravelTime API for the same location and you can drag the marker about and it quickly recalculates points of interest or expand it out up to 90 mins journey time. https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929&0_tt=15&0_time=d1506011559544&0_title=1st%20Ave%2C%20Seattle%2C%20Washington%2098121%2C%20United%20States&0_lat=47.61466&poi=shop https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929...

karmakaze 9y ago

City Block distance metric aka Taxicab geometry applies here. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry

xg15 9y ago

The idea has something, but I'd hesitate to call something that completely changes depending on on when, where and by whom it is viewed a map at all. This is a nice tool to answer the descision-making question "where can I find a good restaurant to get to in reasonable proximity?" that the article talked about - but I'm worried about the undertones in it that were equating it to an actual map. I'm not sure if that's their idea but if they are thinking about using this to replace geographical maps, they should stop that thought quickly - there is an awful lot of information that a geographical map gives you that this doesn't.

mholmes680 9y ago

Its cool, and I can see the usefulness. After I used it for 5 mins I started thinking "hey I really could care less which direction I need to travel for lunch anyways", so its doing its stated goal there. My only issue is that they define it as a "map". Its, well, its not. Its a useful tool, but a map tells you how to go there, and this is not that (until you click on something, so that second piece is a map fine). I can concede its a map in the sense that multiple places plotted are still direction-ally related to each other, but that's counter to going ahead and throwing out the map-streets in the first place.

joelanman 9y ago

not sure whether this gives much advantage over just listing the results in order of travel time? It gives an indication of direction, but is that really useful?