Show HN: I built a transit travel time map

[ng-henry]

This was something I built while trying to look for housing in Toronto that was decently transit-accessible to my office while still cheap.

The backend is written in Rust. It parses public GTFS data from transit agencies and performs a simple heuristics-based BFS on the bus lines to calculate how long to reach all points in a city.

The frontend uses React and Mapbox GL to render each individual road segment based on how long it takes to reach.

This project was a great excuse to learn Rust, deployments, and mapping. The source code is here if you are interested: http://github.com/econaxis/time2reach

[baq]

Public service announcement - these kind of maps are known as isochrone maps and they're anything but new, but are (IMHO criminally) unpopular. They're extremely helpful when house hunting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map

[cridenour]

Agreed. It took weeks of researching to find this term when I was looking to optimize travel time search. Once I did, everything became easier! Ended up forking Open Transit Planner, this was back in 2015. Turned 40 minutes real estate searches into 40ms or so.

[throwaway22032]

They are to a point, I think.

I made one of these in the past when looking for places to live in London. The ultimate conclusion was that you could have inexpensive, short travel time, or nice/safe, choose two.

I gave up after realising that the market signals worked - if ignoring Central London it'd pretty much just be "more expensive = nicer"

[nashashmi]

They are also popular when establishing an office space, or when recruiting en masse for job opportunities/

[dopidopHN]

Yeah I would have noticed that the place I’m renting for a month in Montreal is in dark shades of blue!

[bkor]

The following site works for The Netherlands (not just Amsterdam): https://mapitout.iamsterdam.com/

It has some minor limitations to select the time (has to one of the predefined options). That can be worked around by changing the URL parameter.

It can also map out multiple locations and see the overlap.

It's fairly useful to see where you want to live while taking e.g. the office location into account. It gave me more options than I thought I had, partly because I didn't think about small towns with a train station.

[ng-henry]

Wow, this website is very pretty. It's similar to what I envisioned when I built this project, but I wanted to make a heatmap (of all possible times) rather than just an isochrone. The little "islands" of fast transit access is also what I wanted to show with my project too! It's cool to discover the little spots near train stations that are cheaper but offer an equivalent commute to the city center.

There's also https://www.chronotrains.com which was another inspiration when building this project too.

[timvdalen]

Hey, that's super interesting. Put in my and my SO's current distances, and the overlap seems pretty accurate (though smaller than I was hoping for!)

[vipshek]

This is super cool! I particularly like that you render the route along transit lines to reach each destination, which is differentiated from other isochrone maps I've seen. I would love to use this while hunting for apartments in a large city.

I do think there are a number of things you could do to improve the UX here. Hope this doesn't come across as too harsh, but here are some suggestions...

1. Double-click to set origin makes sense, but hover to set a destination is a bit weird, for two reasons: a. There's no way to "lock" a destination by clicking, so I can't pick a route I want to see and fix my view on it. The UI feels jittery as a result. b. In some cases (I'm looking at NYC), loading the route to the hovered destination hangs for several seconds. I don't know if this is just an issue because your server is overloaded, but it's a weird state to be in.

I'd consider: 1) adding a loading state when the route to the destination is being computed, 2) enable clicking a point to lock viewing that route, 3) maybe disabling the hover interaction entirely, though if it were performant, it would be pretty nice to have.

2. The "arrival time" concept is a slightly odd. I'd prefer to just see the amount of time it'll take to get to a destination, rather than an arrival time based on a particular starting time. I don't think anyone's going to use this to plan a specific route at a specific time; instead, they'll use it to explore locations of interest, and explore how long it'll take to get to various destinations. I see you show the trip duration in the bottom-left, but having it be an arrow pointing to a gradient spectrum is much harder to parse than just saying "27 minutes".

3. The fade effect on the side panel is a bit weird. It does draw more attention to the map, but the side panel is still occluding my view, and having it faded just makes the text very hard to read. I'd consider making it un-faded, but adding some way to collapse it.

[ng-henry]

Hey, thanks for the feedback! Greatly appreciated.

1. Yes I think "locking" makes sense. The entire action of viewing the paths to different destinations still needs to be polished up, especially for the mobile version as well. When I tried it before posting to HN it was instant (30ms) but now it seems to be extra laggy because the CPU is maxed. I just upgraded the server from 4 -> 16 cpus, so let's hope that does something haha.

2. 100%

3. Agree as well. I chose the easiest solution when developing (and I also develop on a large monitor so it's harder to notice the occlusion), but adding a hide toggle would certainly have been better.

[midoridensha]

>2. The "arrival time" concept is a slightly odd.

There's nothing odd about it. Your arrival time entirely depends on the train schedule, and you can only arrive at your destination at certain discrete times because of this.

>I don't think anyone's going to use this to plan a specific route at a specific time;

I use Google Maps to do this exact thing all the time. I need to be at a certain place at a certain time, so I set the place and arrival time and have it plot a route and show me all the available options.

[LorenPechtel]

Arrival time makes perfect sense when the objective is getting to work. If I need to be at work at 8am the (hypothetical) bus that gets me there at 7:50 works but the one that gets me there at 8:05 doesn't. Simply looking at travel time doesn't tell me I need to sit an extra 10 minutes.

[guessmyname]

I get sad every time I return back to America from Asia because of how small the public infrastructure is in many parts of America compared to Asia.

If anyone has lived or at least visited places like Tokyo, Japan or Shanghai, China, you probably understand what I am referring to.

[samstave]

I have maintained that any US Public Transportation employee with any amount of agency/authority should be required to go to SEA (singapore, HK, Shanghai, Tokyo) and be required to go to meetings which are far from their hotel but they must get there via public transport only...

This will make their requests for more money/raises/etc seem absolutely insane when you compare what these countries/cities/agencies do WRT to transporting millions of people efficiently every single day - and not to mention just how clean such systems are.

When you go through stations in HK - you see well-uniformed cleaning folks all over the place.

[giovannibonetti]

Population density makes a huge difference. The more people live in a city, the more funds the government has to invest to get a better transportation system.

In general, population density in East Asia is far higher than in the US.

[charlieyu1]

Last time I went to Japan, they had announcements of apologies about severe delays. The delay was less than 5 minutes.

Today I'm stuck on a tram for an hour and the tram company did not even tell us what happened or when would we be unstuck.

[ghaff]

Asia is also home to cities with some of the most congested sprawl with mediocre (at best) public transportation in the world. Tokyo and Shanghai are great. Somewhere like Jakarta less so.

[nashashmi]

I hope you are not comparing American suburbs to Asian urban communities. This is a common misconception among immigrants that they compare commuting opportunities of suburbia to urban cities in Asia.

[postmortembees]

Does "double click anywhere" mean "double click anywhere within these N cities"? I couldn't initially tell if they were examples or limits.

[ZeWaka]

limits, the gtfs data is only set for those cities / transit providers

[ComputerGuru]

It’s only the five cities listed at the top, right?

(I initially thought they were just bookmarks/shortcuts to some good demos then I realized they influenced the traffic sources checkbox at the bottom so they had to determine what the map showed rather than merely index it.)

[ng-henry]

Yes that's right. I do plan on adding other cities in the future, but these are the ones I've chosen because I've lived in them or I think they have a cool transit story.

[arafalov]

I want very similar to this but for shopping without a car.

Like, if I want to buy something big from Walmart or Costco (to keep to generic shop names) and it does not matter if I am on a train/metro/subway for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, but it totally does matter number of transport switches of bus->subway) and walking is really bad.

So, it would make sense to go to a very distant shop, but that is right opposite the direct train.

Does anything like this exist (for any city really)? The algorithm must be quite similar, but with different graph steps weighted differently depending on method of movement.

[ng-henry]

Not sure if something like this exists yet, but certainly do-able within my implementation.

For example, when choosing the best route, it penalizes every transfer by 120 seconds [1]. Therefore, a route that takes 2 minutes longer is equivalent to one transfer.

It'd be cool to have a tool where you can dynamically change these settings, and maybe even have different transfer penalties depending on if you're transferring inside a station vs walking outside.

[1]: https://github.com/econaxis/time2reach/blob/main/src/formatt...

[o10449366]

This is a great idea. I can only speak to NYC, but the data sources don't give good recommendations. Optimal routing for time in NYC is tricky though and relying on only mapping services and not a combination of walking, biking, buses, and subways leads to longer travel times than necessary.

For example, there are many parts of Brooklyn where no transit lines are directly connected and you have to go into Manhattan first, meaning if you took the train it would take 1+ hours, versus bus (30 minutes) or biking (15 minutes).

[jwestbury]

Have you used CityMapper? I haven't used it in NYC, but I use in in London, and it's solved this problem much better than Google/Apple Maps.

Edit: Though, CityMapper doesn't actually provide a travel time map, alas.

[throwaway737248]

This is awesome - https://www.mapnificent.net/ is a similar project (also open source). Might be cool to collaborate on data sources?

[ikawe]

Very nice! Do you have any documentation for how to add another city or transit region?

I work on some of the rust libraries you've used. If you'd like to ask questions about rust+geo or do a show & tell, consider joining us in the georust discord: https://discord.com/invite/Fp2aape

I'm also always interested to hear new people's experience building real things with our libraries. What were the hangups?

[KronisLV]

What a cool idea! Sadly, the Mapbox vector maps really struggle on my mid/low range Android phone (Firefox as the browser).

I've actually briefly looked into it before, but I've no idea why vector maps in particular are so bad, yet everyone still praises them a lot vs regular tiled raster maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-IRtBGO9rM

Not to detract from the cool thing you've made, don't mind my musings.

[forrestthewoods]

Nice! Once upon a time I did something very similar.

https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/visualizing_commute_tim...

AFAICT the only reliable source of commute and transit times is Google Maps. To be useful it requires real traffic data. Unfortunately Google jacked up the prices way too high to be useful.

My dream is a service for building isochrone maps with full support for walking/biking/transit/driving.

[ackfoobar]

I used the walkshed map (also supports bike, car, and transit) to decide which part of the city to live in.

https://app.traveltime.com/search/0-lat=43.64399&0-lng=-79.3...

[midoridensha]

Google doesn't generate traffic data for public transit services; they buy it from the agencies that run those services. You can go directly to them for it.

[gravypod]

This is amazing. I'd love if it could include:

1. Percent cancellations of lines (past 30d, past 1 year)

2. Average & deviation of delay (past 30d, past 1 year)

I think these factors could be used to identify unreliable lines. For example, looking at my commute line, it seems like I could get into the city in 50ish minutes but I know most of the times I get on the train from door to door it has been recently very unreliable with the most recent times being ~1hr min door to door.

We also have a lot of problems with cancellations on my way home.

[jablongo]

Love it, but I’m pretty sure you’re missing ferry routes in the NYC calculations (which are public). It also might be worth including Citibike as an optional additional method.

[eddy162]

This is super super cool! This kind of visualization is so much more useful for finding a transit-friendly spot to live than the generic TransitScores real-estate websites have. Would be nice if the frequency of bus routes could be visualized too, and hope you find a way to add more cities painlessly. Having worked in transit planning, this is really useful for network gap analysis - like finding areas where connectivity could be improved.

[dabreegster]

Super awesome! I like how you just color roads to show time. When you calculate polygons to try and cover the whole area in some 5-10 minute bucket, you can wind up with all sorts of odd holes far away from roads. Keep it simple.

https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet/pull/1075

[ShakataGaNai]

SF Bay Area map is somewhat lacking of about half the BART system (SF to Antioch by BART is less than 90mn, but doesn't show at all. Same for Dublin). Also everything North and East of Berkley is cut off, and most of San Jose is missing. As is everything in the North Bay. SMART, County Connection, Marin Transit, SOLTrans are all listed by no data shows up.

[TheBigRoomXXL]

I open it on mobile and got an entirely white page

[ng-henry]

Oops! I was only able to test it on my iphone and the devices in the Chrome browser simulator :(. If you're willing, what phone/browser are you using?

[IG_Semmelweiss]

i had the same in FF desktop , blank page with JS enabled (ublock default = disable everything)

Then i enabled all Font and Cosmetic Filtering to ON on uBlock, and the website worked.

One of the few sites that requires Cosmetics / Fonts enabled to work right.

[jedberg]

Pull up San Fransisco, double-click on the Sunset, get depressed at how little distance you can cover in 45 minutes.

[nestorD]

I believe the author is missing some data sources (bus lines?). There are areas I know are reachable within 30 minutes from downtown Berkeley that do not appear on the map.

[CalRobert]

I really like your map styling! It's slow but nice when working.

People interested in this might also enjoy: https://www.mapnificent.net/

Or if you're in Ireland: gaffologist.com (disclaimer - I made this and it only focuses on rail)