8 ms·

Interactive visualization of commute times for all US cities

229 points by shashashasha 14y ago

yarone 14y ago
Thinking out loud: In an attempt to vastly improve the data, could a mobile app be written that can "detect" if you are driving (exact location, speed, alignment/frequency to your past paths, etc), in such a way that the data could be automatically collected and crowdsourced? Fire up the app, let it run in background, and it logs everything passively and adds it to global data set. Feasible?
- sirlancer 14y ago
  Forgive me if I've heard wrong or if this is just wishful thinking, but doesn't Google do this with Navigation? I believe there's an option to view a traffic layer and from what I've seen in my commutes, it's fairly accurate for gauging traffic density. It should also be capable of calculate travel time based upon crowdsourced traffic information from Android users.
  - skeletonjelly 14y ago
    They do yeah. On Android there's even a widget that you set with your destination and it'll tell you the journey time. Would be great to see their live traffic data used for this journey time metric across the world. I'm moving interstate here in Australia, would certainly help narrow down choosing suburbs.
shashashasha 14y ago
Hi, Sha from Trulia here. I worked on some of the frontend aspects of this visualization and would be happy to answer any questions. We're pulling in OSM road data and published GTFS files for public transit routing. I just linked to SF but you can also search for other cities: http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/new-york-ny http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/new-york-ny http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/miami-fl http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/miami-fl http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx
- erode 14y ago
  Not really applicable to me it seems. I commute across the Twin Cities in Minnesota in about 50 minutes but it wouldn't even calculate my times due to it being "well over 60 minutes" which is the max the filter will apply. How useful can you expect this to be, since commuting times can vary wildly even if you begin your commute 10 minutes earlier?
  - nostromo 14y ago
    You're being too critical. This isn't a website to tell you your exact commute time. If you want that, try Google Maps. This is to show you roughly estimated travel times in all directions when you're looking at purchasing real-estate. And I think it works very well for that.
  - benajnim 14y ago
    Seems inaccurate for my commuting times to various points in the metro as well. Looking at Broadway running east-west to the north of downtown, its a major thoroughfare that can take you to several major highways but its not being reflected.
- pacaro 14y ago
  This is cool, however I notice that your transit commute times are more optimistic that drive times in some places. For example, from downtown Kirkland, WA. You have the bus being faster than driving, there is no HOV lane that would explain this, my real commute choice is driving (10-15 minutes) or bus (35-40 minutes) but your heat map pretty much inverts those numbers.
- peterwwillis 14y ago
  Is this the absolute worst-case commute times? It never takes me that long to commute into/out of miami, or baltimore, or fort lauderdale. More like half the time. DC actually seemed like it went the opposite way as it usually takes an hour and a half to get from VA through the beltway into DC while the map showed only an hour for as far out as Dale City. A half hour (or more) from Petworth into Downtown during rush hour is fair, since DC has probably the slowest crappiest drivers in the nation. Updated theory: these commute times might not be based on actual driver data, it's probably a very rough estimation based on distance, travel time, speed limit, and population. It needs to be weighted based on the curve of traffic based on time and the way locals drive. Boca commuting will probably be slower than Miami commuting on average, unless you're on the highway in which case you're totally screwed in Miami. Not to mention anywhere there's an on-ramp with lots of flow you're going to make a choke point, so times would increase a lot, unless you started after that exit. tl;dr Traffic is hard.
brechin 14y ago
I work in Minneapolis and my commute is about 30-40% (15-20 min) less than what this site says. Neat idea, but certainly needs improvement for broad real-world use.
- datasage 14y ago
  It seems to line up pretty well if you consider it round trip commute time.
- protomyth 14y ago
  It doesn't seem to pick up the jumps in time of stuff like 394->94 though.
taumeson 14y ago
Hey Sha -- I can't speak for the rest of your cities, but Tampa, FL is VERY wrong. I drug the end point to downtown St. Petersburg and the times given appear to be almost double what it truly takes to commute, over a certain threshold. Under 20 minutes seems to be accurate, but it starts trending towards 30, 40, 60 minutes too quickly. I'll tell you what, though -- great UX and visualization. Very plain to read and utilize the slider functionality. I suggest modifying the legend to be more explicit about what the color bands mean -- perhaps labeling each color, for instance.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Looks nice, great UI, but I think the Minneapolis / St. Paul numbers are a tad bit off. It doesn't seem to show the big changes in time as you cross choke points (394 -> 94 for example).
dholowiski 14y ago
Can't get to it on my android phone. Get a prompt to download the app, then an Oops 404 page not found.
exue 14y ago
Question: Is the pointer the start location or the end location of the commute? It wasn't immediately obvious to me and in many areas it makes a huge difference. It seems like it's just pulling worst case "in traffic" drive times right now. Also is it possible to adjust the time of day that one commutes? (since many may work shifts off rush hour and encounter little/no traffic or strange/intermittent transit schedules)
- elliottcarlson 14y ago
  The pointer should be the start location - so drag that to where you live - then from there you can see the estimated commute time based on the heat map.
- dllthomas 14y ago
  End location - Trulia is trying to sell you houses that have a good commute to your work.
- Yen 14y ago
  On the large scale, you get pretty much the same map whether you're calculating 'to' the marker or 'from' the marker. The only exception is if you plan on commuting in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, both ways. i.e., if you think about commuting to work in the morning, the heatmap will show you the times it takes to drive from any given location to the marker. If you're thinking about driving home in the evening, you can think of the time from the marker to any given location. on the macro scale, most streets aren't one-way, and commute times tend to be symmetric.
bryanjclark 14y ago
Great concept, but I think there are a lot of data errors here. (In Seattle, a drive I take about 5 minutes to make was listed as taking an hour!)
- wiredfool 14y ago
  Yeah, I'm seeing consistent ~3x times in my location outside Seattle (a rural, no traffic sort of place). Within Seattle, well, Downtown to Magnolia doesn't take an hour. It really looks algorithmic based on street size, assuming some specific congestion level. I'm not seeing any indication of some of the known congestion points that I used to have to deal with.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
whalesalad 14y ago
This is the most worthless chart I've ever seen. When would this be useful? It's roughly the same everywhere. Before I am downvoted into oblivion... honestly can someone explain to me when they would ever reference this chart? Give me one good example.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  If it was accurate, it would be very helpful if, say, I got a new job, or was looking to relocate areas for a job, I could pick out neighborhoods I'd want to live in based off of commute times to my new workplace. And if I knew where I thought I wanted to live, I could see if it would be too far to work. or if I was on travel, and had a meeting at a client site at point a. but a hotel near my companies office at point b, I could see the travel times, and maybe even go for a hotel closer to point a (or hotels near point a are too expensive, how far would cheaper hotels be for my commute) .
- elliottcarlson 14y ago
  If someone is looking to relocate to a new (and thus unfamiliar) location and they need to figure out how far they would comfortably be willing to live based on commute times vs. cost of living.
- waffle_ss 14y ago
  Perhaps a bit harsh, but I have to agree on the usefulness factor. Obviously the UI looks excellent, but it doesn't matter because the data is wildly off for both areas that I've commuted and seems to be a widespread issue based on other comments. They probably should have focused on getting better data before launching. Garbage in, garbage out I guess. I hope they can improve the integrity of the data because it has a lot of potential.
- xsmasher 14y ago
  What location were you looking at, and what do you mean by "It's roughly the same everywhere?"
ImprovedSilence 14y ago
I think it's a very awesome idea, and I'm impressed with the visuals. However it seems that several people on here are claiming wildly inaccurate commute times, and I myself have noticed this as well. I think part of the problem is that it is hard to get a full understanding of what rush hour traffic is like, and that the actual volumes of traffic and slowdown differ depending on locality and road. Sever places, including my home town, have way overblown estimates, such as 40min commute on a road that never takes more than 15. and that's a two way, two lane road. However City driving can be much much different, and even dependent on end of day vs. morning. For example, my DC commute was 40min in the morning (it is reverse rush hour) but my commute home was always a hour and 15, on the same road, reverse commute both times. edit: and if I could make any other suggestion, I would be to allow me to continue to zoom out. The zoom sticks at a certain point, and it is not zoomed out far enough for me.
- jmduke 14y ago
  Agreed. The visualization concept itself is really great, but the data seems wildly incorrect in places.
- Yen 14y ago
  Hi, Talin from Trulia here. As many commentors have pointed out, our time-accuracy is not exactly 100% yet. :) This is our first iteration on this concept, so we are using some heuristics to try to get times roughly close, and accurate relative to each other. We're also validating the user experience, value as a product, etc. I'm still investigating a good set for nationwide traffic data, which will help give us a much more accurate picture of real-world commute times. Traffic varies so very much city to city :)
  - rogerbinns 14y ago
    Where I live (Santa Cruz, CA) it doesn't know about a local highway that is virtually stationary every afternoon/evening. Have you considered partnering with someone like Waze to get anonymised actual trips, which will be far more accurate than pure traffic data (or they could be merged).
- 14y ago
rburhum 14y ago
Most people are missing some of the most amazing stuff here. First, how the slider works without refreshing the tiles. They have tiled the travel costs http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.7749295/-122.41941550000001/13/1309/3166.json?v=1&degree_buffer=0.002&callback=trulia.maps http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.774... and are drawing these changes without having to refresh the map. That's cool. Secondly, they have used Openstreetmap for calculating travel time. I cannot imagine OSM having a street segment cost that is too accurate, so it was probably derived from pure geometry (think about it... traversing .25miles in downtown SF has a much higher cost than .25 miles on the 5 freeway). If instead, you used a Navteq or Teleatlas dataset for this, I bet the isochrone polygons would come out much more accurate. My hats off to the Trulia team, this is good stuff.
- juiceandjuice 14y ago
  The physicist in me won't think it's cool until there's some monte carlo simulations of commute times with some additional random walk information for alternate routes and stop light entropy, then a log-likelihood fit to find the best fit commute time. Just kidding, it's alright, it's kind of off for the SF/PA commute though, by nearly a factor of two for many places in SF, unless you're doing absolute worst case scenario every day of the week.
lunchbox 14y ago
WalkScore has similar functionality (click on "My Commutes"): http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco The numbers there are somewhat different. You can also enter more than one commute location. So you can find all places that are within 20 minutes of your office AND 30 minutes of your girlfriend's house. The other tabs have some pretty cool filters, such as proximity to public transit, grocery stores, etc. They also have heatmaps showing how "walkable" a particular neighborhood is, i.e. how much you can get your daily errands done without needing a car: http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco
jszielenski 14y ago
Very cool site!
jvm 14y ago
Transit times were pretty spot on for New York, nice job guys!
frankydp 14y ago
This is very optimistic to the actual commute times in Atlanta. They are off by a factor of 2 or 3. Not sure as to the cause but the vector mapping in Atlanta is terrible, so is most likely routing problems or the like.
marchdown 14y ago
I've read it as "Interactive visualization of commute times for all US citizens." the scary thing is that in another ten year this may well be reality, given the path we're on.
danielweber 14y ago
According to this I love an hour from work. Wrong by about 30 minutes.
peapicker 14y ago
It says my commute time is 48 minutes to my work (in Denver). In reality, it is 25 min, at rush hour, 90% of the time. Worst case is a surprise bad blizzard, it can take 2 hours if that happens (about once every four years)
jrockway 14y ago
This data looks really good. It even seems like express subway services are taken into account, which is rare for this kind of thing. It would be nice to see biking times in addition to car/public transit, however.
gavreh 14y ago
This doesn't seem very accurate, at least for St. Louis, MO
igorgue 14y ago
Some of the data is wrong, e.g. it takes me 30 mins to go to my office and Trulia is saying it's 60 minutes (miami). But, the UI is great, I just wish they had better data, seems like it's just calculated with distance / avg mph, traffic in this problem has a lot to do to get an accurate calculation.
ShabbyDoo 14y ago
Imagine stating the location of your work and the cost of your time in $/hour (whatever you assign to it), and the size of housing unit you want. The, you would see a map colored based on the delta between the cost of your commute (via either personal vehicle or public transit) and the cost of housing in various areas. I bet that, for most urban dwellers, there would be a few surprising points on the map.
T_S_ 14y ago
Looks to me like you divide by 1.5 to get the right time.
faulkner 14y ago
You have support for driving and public transit but not for bikes? Seems like you could get some rough estimates by using elevation variance as a multiplier for driving time.
zschallz 14y ago
Really nice. Commute is very inaccurate for the Indianapolis area, however. One marked as 1 hour took me 25-30 minutes.
duck 14y ago
Looking at this reminds me how glad I am of the fact I get to telecommute... and the fact I only put 2900 miles on my truck last year. Very nice visuals though!
jaredsohn 14y ago
Mapnificent (http://www.mapnificent.net/ http://www.mapnificent.net/) does something like this and even has an API. I started writing a Chrome extension using the API that you could apply to any existing Google Maps v3 map (such as AirBnB), but I've abandoned it since 1) I was disappointed that quite a few sites with Google maps are still using older versions (such as Padmapper) and 2) I lack time. I believe the Chrome extension portion is working, but it needs a UI overlayed on the map for specifying locations of interest. If anyone is interested in working on this, send me a message and I'll post what I have to github.
madiator 14y ago
I saw something very similar last year. But I don't a clue neither on the website nor the product name. The only thing I remember is that it was a German guy (I guess!). Could you (Trulia) please let us know what/who motivated this work?
rdl 14y ago
It might be worth doing "rush hour" and "non-rush hour". It takes me 48 minutes door to door from downtown Oakland to Mountain View, going 80 on I-880 and 70-75 on 84 and 101 (i.e. flow of traffic, and at the speed where you won't get a speeding ticket even for going past a cop, especially if you slow down slightly on seeing one..). It takes 1.5-2h during rush hour on the same route if anything goes wrong (50-75% of the time there is at least one accident or construction). Both numbers are meaningful, but distinct. Transit is the same way, in the other direction -- during peak commute hours, trains are frequent and/or synced. During off-hours, you can be waiting 30-59 minutes for a connection, 1-2 times.
curlypaul924 14y ago
It greatly overestimates driving times for Charleston, SC

229 points by shashashasha 14y ago

Thinking out loud: In an attempt to vastly improve the data, could a mobile app be written that can "detect" if you are driving (exact location, speed, alignment/frequency to your past paths, etc), in such a way that the data could be automatically collected and crowdsourced? Fire up the app, let it run in background, and it logs everything passively and adds it to global data set. Feasible?

sirlancer 14y ago
Forgive me if I've heard wrong or if this is just wishful thinking, but doesn't Google do this with Navigation? I believe there's an option to view a traffic layer and from what I've seen in my commutes, it's fairly accurate for gauging traffic density. It should also be capable of calculate travel time based upon crowdsourced traffic information from Android users.
- skeletonjelly 14y ago
  They do yeah. On Android there's even a widget that you set with your destination and it'll tell you the journey time. Would be great to see their live traffic data used for this journey time metric across the world. I'm moving interstate here in Australia, would certainly help narrow down choosing suburbs.

shashashasha 14y ago

Hi, Sha from Trulia here. I worked on some of the frontend aspects of this visualization and would be happy to answer any questions. We're pulling in OSM road data and published GTFS files for public transit routing. I just linked to SF but you can also search for other cities: http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/new-york-ny http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/new-york-ny http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/miami-fl http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/miami-fl http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx

erode 14y ago
Not really applicable to me it seems. I commute across the Twin Cities in Minnesota in about 50 minutes but it wouldn't even calculate my times due to it being "well over 60 minutes" which is the max the filter will apply. How useful can you expect this to be, since commuting times can vary wildly even if you begin your commute 10 minutes earlier?
- nostromo 14y ago
  You're being too critical. This isn't a website to tell you your exact commute time. If you want that, try Google Maps. This is to show you roughly estimated travel times in all directions when you're looking at purchasing real-estate. And I think it works very well for that.
- benajnim 14y ago
  Seems inaccurate for my commuting times to various points in the metro as well. Looking at Broadway running east-west to the north of downtown, its a major thoroughfare that can take you to several major highways but its not being reflected.
pacaro 14y ago
This is cool, however I notice that your transit commute times are more optimistic that drive times in some places. For example, from downtown Kirkland, WA. You have the bus being faster than driving, there is no HOV lane that would explain this, my real commute choice is driving (10-15 minutes) or bus (35-40 minutes) but your heat map pretty much inverts those numbers.
peterwwillis 14y ago
Is this the absolute worst-case commute times? It never takes me that long to commute into/out of miami, or baltimore, or fort lauderdale. More like half the time. DC actually seemed like it went the opposite way as it usually takes an hour and a half to get from VA through the beltway into DC while the map showed only an hour for as far out as Dale City. A half hour (or more) from Petworth into Downtown during rush hour is fair, since DC has probably the slowest crappiest drivers in the nation. Updated theory: these commute times might not be based on actual driver data, it's probably a very rough estimation based on distance, travel time, speed limit, and population. It needs to be weighted based on the curve of traffic based on time and the way locals drive. Boca commuting will probably be slower than Miami commuting on average, unless you're on the highway in which case you're totally screwed in Miami. Not to mention anywhere there's an on-ramp with lots of flow you're going to make a choke point, so times would increase a lot, unless you started after that exit. tl;dr Traffic is hard.

brechin 14y ago

I work in Minneapolis and my commute is about 30-40% (15-20 min) less than what this site says. Neat idea, but certainly needs improvement for broad real-world use.

datasage 14y ago
It seems to line up pretty well if you consider it round trip commute time.
protomyth 14y ago
It doesn't seem to pick up the jumps in time of stuff like 394->94 though.

taumeson 14y ago

Hey Sha -- I can't speak for the rest of your cities, but Tampa, FL is VERY wrong. I drug the end point to downtown St. Petersburg and the times given appear to be almost double what it truly takes to commute, over a certain threshold. Under 20 minutes seems to be accurate, but it starts trending towards 30, 40, 60 minutes too quickly. I'll tell you what, though -- great UX and visualization. Very plain to read and utilize the slider functionality. I suggest modifying the legend to be more explicit about what the color bands mean -- perhaps labeling each color, for instance.

protomyth 14y ago
Looks nice, great UI, but I think the Minneapolis / St. Paul numbers are a tad bit off. It doesn't seem to show the big changes in time as you cross choke points (394 -> 94 for example).

dholowiski 14y ago

Can't get to it on my android phone. Get a prompt to download the app, then an Oops 404 page not found.

exue 14y ago

Question: Is the pointer the start location or the end location of the commute? It wasn't immediately obvious to me and in many areas it makes a huge difference. It seems like it's just pulling worst case "in traffic" drive times right now. Also is it possible to adjust the time of day that one commutes? (since many may work shifts off rush hour and encounter little/no traffic or strange/intermittent transit schedules)

elliottcarlson 14y ago
The pointer should be the start location - so drag that to where you live - then from there you can see the estimated commute time based on the heat map.
dllthomas 14y ago
End location - Trulia is trying to sell you houses that have a good commute to your work.
Yen 14y ago
On the large scale, you get pretty much the same map whether you're calculating 'to' the marker or 'from' the marker. The only exception is if you plan on commuting in the opposite direction of rush hour traffic, both ways. i.e., if you think about commuting to work in the morning, the heatmap will show you the times it takes to drive from any given location to the marker. If you're thinking about driving home in the evening, you can think of the time from the marker to any given location. on the macro scale, most streets aren't one-way, and commute times tend to be symmetric.

bryanjclark 14y ago

Great concept, but I think there are a lot of data errors here. (In Seattle, a drive I take about 5 minutes to make was listed as taking an hour!)

wiredfool 14y ago
Yeah, I'm seeing consistent ~3x times in my location outside Seattle (a rural, no traffic sort of place). Within Seattle, well, Downtown to Magnolia doesn't take an hour. It really looks algorithmic based on street size, assuming some specific congestion level. I'm not seeing any indication of some of the known congestion points that I used to have to deal with.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

whalesalad 14y ago

This is the most worthless chart I've ever seen. When would this be useful? It's roughly the same everywhere. Before I am downvoted into oblivion... honestly can someone explain to me when they would ever reference this chart? Give me one good example.

ImprovedSilence 14y ago
If it was accurate, it would be very helpful if, say, I got a new job, or was looking to relocate areas for a job, I could pick out neighborhoods I'd want to live in based off of commute times to my new workplace. And if I knew where I thought I wanted to live, I could see if it would be too far to work. or if I was on travel, and had a meeting at a client site at point a. but a hotel near my companies office at point b, I could see the travel times, and maybe even go for a hotel closer to point a (or hotels near point a are too expensive, how far would cheaper hotels be for my commute) .
elliottcarlson 14y ago
If someone is looking to relocate to a new (and thus unfamiliar) location and they need to figure out how far they would comfortably be willing to live based on commute times vs. cost of living.
waffle_ss 14y ago
Perhaps a bit harsh, but I have to agree on the usefulness factor. Obviously the UI looks excellent, but it doesn't matter because the data is wildly off for both areas that I've commuted and seems to be a widespread issue based on other comments. They probably should have focused on getting better data before launching. Garbage in, garbage out I guess. I hope they can improve the integrity of the data because it has a lot of potential.
xsmasher 14y ago
What location were you looking at, and what do you mean by "It's roughly the same everywhere?"

ImprovedSilence 14y ago

I think it's a very awesome idea, and I'm impressed with the visuals. However it seems that several people on here are claiming wildly inaccurate commute times, and I myself have noticed this as well. I think part of the problem is that it is hard to get a full understanding of what rush hour traffic is like, and that the actual volumes of traffic and slowdown differ depending on locality and road. Sever places, including my home town, have way overblown estimates, such as 40min commute on a road that never takes more than 15. and that's a two way, two lane road. However City driving can be much much different, and even dependent on end of day vs. morning. For example, my DC commute was 40min in the morning (it is reverse rush hour) but my commute home was always a hour and 15, on the same road, reverse commute both times. edit: and if I could make any other suggestion, I would be to allow me to continue to zoom out. The zoom sticks at a certain point, and it is not zoomed out far enough for me.

jmduke 14y ago
Agreed. The visualization concept itself is really great, but the data seems wildly incorrect in places.
Yen 14y ago
Hi, Talin from Trulia here. As many commentors have pointed out, our time-accuracy is not exactly 100% yet. :) This is our first iteration on this concept, so we are using some heuristics to try to get times roughly close, and accurate relative to each other. We're also validating the user experience, value as a product, etc. I'm still investigating a good set for nationwide traffic data, which will help give us a much more accurate picture of real-world commute times. Traffic varies so very much city to city :)
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Where I live (Santa Cruz, CA) it doesn't know about a local highway that is virtually stationary every afternoon/evening. Have you considered partnering with someone like Waze to get anonymised actual trips, which will be far more accurate than pure traffic data (or they could be merged).
14y ago

rburhum 14y ago

Most people are missing some of the most amazing stuff here. First, how the slider works without refreshing the tiles. They have tiled the travel costs http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.7749295/-122.41941550000001/13/1309/3166.json?v=1&degree_buffer=0.002&callback=trulia.maps http://tiles.trulia.com/commute/time_map/data/driving/37.774... and are drawing these changes without having to refresh the map. That's cool. Secondly, they have used Openstreetmap for calculating travel time. I cannot imagine OSM having a street segment cost that is too accurate, so it was probably derived from pure geometry (think about it... traversing .25miles in downtown SF has a much higher cost than .25 miles on the 5 freeway). If instead, you used a Navteq or Teleatlas dataset for this, I bet the isochrone polygons would come out much more accurate. My hats off to the Trulia team, this is good stuff.

juiceandjuice 14y ago
The physicist in me won't think it's cool until there's some monte carlo simulations of commute times with some additional random walk information for alternate routes and stop light entropy, then a log-likelihood fit to find the best fit commute time. Just kidding, it's alright, it's kind of off for the SF/PA commute though, by nearly a factor of two for many places in SF, unless you're doing absolute worst case scenario every day of the week.

lunchbox 14y ago

WalkScore has similar functionality (click on "My Commutes"): http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco The numbers there are somewhat different. You can also enter more than one commute location. So you can find all places that are within 20 minutes of your office AND 30 minutes of your girlfriend's house. The other tabs have some pretty cool filters, such as proximity to public transit, grocery stores, etc. They also have heatmaps showing how "walkable" a particular neighborhood is, i.e. how much you can get your daily errands done without needing a car: http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco http://www.walkscore.com/CA/San_Francisco

jszielenski 14y ago

Very cool site!

jvm 14y ago

Transit times were pretty spot on for New York, nice job guys!

frankydp 14y ago

This is very optimistic to the actual commute times in Atlanta. They are off by a factor of 2 or 3. Not sure as to the cause but the vector mapping in Atlanta is terrible, so is most likely routing problems or the like.

marchdown 14y ago

I've read it as "Interactive visualization of commute times for all US citizens." the scary thing is that in another ten year this may well be reality, given the path we're on.

danielweber 14y ago

According to this I love an hour from work. Wrong by about 30 minutes.

peapicker 14y ago

It says my commute time is 48 minutes to my work (in Denver). In reality, it is 25 min, at rush hour, 90% of the time. Worst case is a surprise bad blizzard, it can take 2 hours if that happens (about once every four years)

jrockway 14y ago

This data looks really good. It even seems like express subway services are taken into account, which is rare for this kind of thing. It would be nice to see biking times in addition to car/public transit, however.

gavreh 14y ago

This doesn't seem very accurate, at least for St. Louis, MO

igorgue 14y ago

Some of the data is wrong, e.g. it takes me 30 mins to go to my office and Trulia is saying it's 60 minutes (miami). But, the UI is great, I just wish they had better data, seems like it's just calculated with distance / avg mph, traffic in this problem has a lot to do to get an accurate calculation.

ShabbyDoo 14y ago

Imagine stating the location of your work and the cost of your time in $/hour (whatever you assign to it), and the size of housing unit you want. The, you would see a map colored based on the delta between the cost of your commute (via either personal vehicle or public transit) and the cost of housing in various areas. I bet that, for most urban dwellers, there would be a few surprising points on the map.

T_S_ 14y ago

Looks to me like you divide by 1.5 to get the right time.

faulkner 14y ago

You have support for driving and public transit but not for bikes? Seems like you could get some rough estimates by using elevation variance as a multiplier for driving time.

zschallz 14y ago

Really nice. Commute is very inaccurate for the Indianapolis area, however. One marked as 1 hour took me 25-30 minutes.

duck 14y ago

Looking at this reminds me how glad I am of the fact I get to telecommute... and the fact I only put 2900 miles on my truck last year. Very nice visuals though!

jaredsohn 14y ago

Mapnificent (http://www.mapnificent.net/ http://www.mapnificent.net/) does something like this and even has an API. I started writing a Chrome extension using the API that you could apply to any existing Google Maps v3 map (such as AirBnB), but I've abandoned it since 1) I was disappointed that quite a few sites with Google maps are still using older versions (such as Padmapper) and 2) I lack time. I believe the Chrome extension portion is working, but it needs a UI overlayed on the map for specifying locations of interest. If anyone is interested in working on this, send me a message and I'll post what I have to github.

madiator 14y ago

I saw something very similar last year. But I don't a clue neither on the website nor the product name. The only thing I remember is that it was a German guy (I guess!). Could you (Trulia) please let us know what/who motivated this work?

rdl 14y ago

It might be worth doing "rush hour" and "non-rush hour". It takes me 48 minutes door to door from downtown Oakland to Mountain View, going 80 on I-880 and 70-75 on 84 and 101 (i.e. flow of traffic, and at the speed where you won't get a speeding ticket even for going past a cop, especially if you slow down slightly on seeing one..). It takes 1.5-2h during rush hour on the same route if anything goes wrong (50-75% of the time there is at least one accident or construction). Both numbers are meaningful, but distinct. Transit is the same way, in the other direction -- during peak commute hours, trains are frequent and/or synced. During off-hours, you can be waiting 30-59 minutes for a connection, 1-2 times.

curlypaul924 14y ago

It greatly overestimates driving times for Charleston, SC