Spacetime maps: A map that warps to show travel time

[stevage]

It's a shame that they're warping an image, rather than warping map data. Having distorted labels is very distracting and makes it hard to get a sense of whether this could possibly be useful.

[peterburkimsher]

Recreating map data is quite time-consuming. I did so though, to make a train map of Taiwan with time-proportional distances between each point. (based on a local train rather than an express train).

https://peterburk.github.io/tra/

If you're interested in a simple Logo programming project for kids, it was a fun, visually pleasing project. If only the public transport companies realised the value in having time-proportional maps.

[freetonik]

Author’s video about building this map is pretty interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC2VQ-oyDG0

[JohnMakin]

Like the idea - lived in LA my whole life and it wasn’t until the start of covid, when I was able to commute across huge swaths of the city in the order of dozens of minutes rather than hours, did I realize how distorted my view of its physical size was - in places like LA, when asked how far something is, an angelino will almost always respond in a measurement of time rather than distance.

[mannyv]

In the New York City area time is the measure of distance. I think that's the same in every large Metro area.

[MattGrommes]

haha, I had the same realization after I moved from San Diego. Nobody in Albuquerque wanted to hear "20 minutes" when asking "How far is X?"

[reedf1]

I'm not sure I properly understand what these maps are visualizing. I'd have expected the London public-transport map to heavily compress adjacent tube stations and expand tube "dead-zones" but this doesn't appear to be the case. It can take me 10 minutes to get to central but 60 mins to get somewhere equidistant in z2 or z3.

[voytec]

NYC seems like bad default example. I had to check other cities to "get" what's this site about. With NYC - everywhere is similarly far.

[MathMonkeyMan]

I was impressed by how efficient both metro and car metrics are.

[hansonkd]

TBH kind of disappointed by how little it distorts, especially for cities with stereotypically difficult travel times by car like LA. almost loos like random distortions as opposed to something to pattern match. Really the only thing noticeable is bodies of water distort the map the most (which explains why LA doesn't get that distorted).

Would be kind of nice for when i click the point that all the points distort based on that point instead of globally trying to position each point relative to every other point.

[dylan604]

And the fact that the distortion is preset and not based on where you click. This is one of those things using heat maps where the clustering is clearly large population centers. Not really as helpful/useful as people think they are

[Nelkins]

Does anybody have any recommendations on self-hosted ways to create isochrone maps? I've been looking at OpenRouteService, Valhalla, and OpenTripPlanner, but I'm finding it difficult to compare them. Don't seem to be many "experience reports" online.

- https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice

- https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla

- https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner

[waonderer]

Reminded me of MIT's game "A Slower Speed of Light"

https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

[nine_k]

I don't exactly understand how it works. E.g. in NYC, Bushwick to Flatbush is notoriously slow (meandering buses only), while Flatbush to Chinatown is quite fast (direct trains over the Manhattan bridge). Despite that, no matter where I click, I only see same twitching map, not a map twitching in a way that would reflect the travel time from the point I click.

(I ignore the idea of traveling by car in thickly populated areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn; it only makes sense if you value your personal space way more than you value both your money and time, and don't have to park.)

[Hnrobert42]

I too was confuse initially. The map doesn't care where you click. Clicking just toggles to the time based map. In that map, physical distance between any two points represents the time to get between those two points.

Whether it accurately does that, as in your Bushwick Flatbush example, I don't know.

[tuukkah]

If you turn on "Focus on hover" in the settings, then it matters where you tap (on mobile).

[kittikitti]

I really appreciate this and hope to see more time infused maps. As we get ready for the arrival of lunar time, these tools move the needle in the right direction.

[jasonjmcghee]

Previous discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808215

If you're on mobile, click the hamburger menu and enable "Focus on hover"

[dvsfish]

What an absolutely fascinating concept