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Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies by dfsnow

Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies by dfsnow

16 Comments

  • Post Author
    pimlottc
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 8:54 pm

    Looks cool. Please allow high max zoom levels, it’s hard to see individual street details on mobile.

  • Post Author
    explosion-s
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 8:56 pm

    [flagged]

  • Post Author
    c_moscardi
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:12 pm

    Amazing! GitHub actions to compute a giant skim matrix is an incredible hack.

    I pretty regularly work with social science researchers who have a need for something like this… will keep it in mind. For a bit we thought of setting something like this up within the Census Bureau, in fact. I have some stories about routing engines from my time there…

  • Post Author
    ynac
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:26 pm

    Well done, dfsnow!

    * some islands seem hamstrung by the approach – see Vashon Island for example.

    * curious what other dataset you might incorporate for managing next level of magnitude smaller trips – e.g. getting a quarter mile to the store for a frozen pizza at the seventh inning stretch.

  • Post Author
    bobthepanda
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm

    Any plans on adding public transit?

  • Post Author
    p_ing
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:34 pm

    It seems that it ignores bridges over rivers making the travel time wildly inaccurate.

  • Post Author
    ctrlp
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:54 pm

    This is great! I've been thinking about building something like this for ages since I started using Smappen [0] for mapping travel times on road trips. Super useful way to travel if you're on an open-ended trip with flexibility.

    [0] https://www.smappen.com/

  • Post Author
    codingmoney
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:55 pm

    well done

  • Post Author
    initramfs
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 9:59 pm

    awesome

  • Post Author
    simonw
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:00 pm

    OK the way you're publishing the data with Parquet and making it accessible through DuckDB is spectacular.

    Your README shows R and Python examples: https://github.com/dfsnow/opentimes?tab=readme-ov-file#using…

    I got it working with the `duckdb` terminal tool like this:

      INSTALL httpfs;
      LOAD httpfs;
      ATTACH 'https://data.opentimes.org/databases/0.0.1.duckdb' AS opentimes;
    
      SELECT origin_id, destination_id, duration_sec
        FROM opentimes.public.times
        WHERE version = '0.0.1'
            AND mode = 'car'
            AND year = '2024'
            AND geography = 'tract'
            AND state = '17'
            AND origin_id LIKE '17031%' limit 10;

  • Post Author
    itissid
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:01 pm

    Travel time context in general could be useful for retrieval before ranking in searches like Yelp or Google maps like products for nearby events and places. My MVP use case is to configure a rerank based on commute "score".

    For example there is just no way I'm going to commute from Brooklyn to Manhattan on a Monday night to eat out.

    I live across the river from Manhattan and what I never understood was why yelp and Google maps upranks restaurants across the river on the other island even though it is highly improbable I would go there.

  • Post Author
    john-titor
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:17 pm

    Does something like this exist for Europe?

  • Post Author
    cowsaymoo
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:29 pm

    Only $10/mo? Where can we go to cover a month

  • Post Author
    rvnx
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:34 pm

    The engineering behind it is very clever. Well done!

  • Post Author
    hatthew
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 10:49 pm

    Very cool! I love the interactive map, but have a couple UX suggestions:

    I usually expect most features of a map to be zoom invariant, with the exception of level of detail. Having the colormap change is surprising, particularly that longer time buckets simply disappear as I zoom in. The two problems with this are that any time I zoom in or out I now have to double check the color key in case it's changed, and if I want to find a travel time for something far away I need to zoom in to find the destination and then back out to see the travel time. Perhaps you can let the user manually choose the colormap granularity/range, or find some way to have a colormap that works at all scales?

    Second suggestion, related, is to display the travel time next to the geography ID in the bottom left corner. This would mitigate the issues with getting a good colormap, since I can then just hover over a geography to get its time anywhere that the colormap isn't sufficient.

  • Post Author
    svcphr
    Posted March 17, 2025 at 11:32 pm

    How did you decide on routing engine? I’ve used Graphhopper in the past — is OSRM an improvement?

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