
Interactive visualization of commute times for all US cities - shashashasha
http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/san-francisco-ca
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shashashasha
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/miami-fl>

<http://www.trulia.com/local#commute/austin-tx>

~~~
peterwwillis
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.

~~~
ap22213
Agreed on DC - the places that I plugged in from northern va. (22102, 22213,
22046, etc.) all seemed to be showing the best-case times. Some places that it
says are a 5-10 commute are more like 30-45 minutes at rush hour.

Also, not related to the commute times, but the crime rates look strange. At
least, it's showing Arlington, VA as almost completely red (very high crime).
Maybe the data is right, but that would be surprising for one of the richer,
more yuppified areas of the US.

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peterwwillis
This map is so inaccurate. I'm looking at Congress and the White House and it
doesn't show any crimes committed at all!

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draz
looks about right for NYC (I'm only posting this so people can know they can
reliably use it)

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ImprovedSilence
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.

~~~
Yen
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
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).

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rburhum
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/37.774...](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)
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
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.

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whalesalad
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
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) .

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taumeson
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
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).

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jaredsohn
Mapnificent (<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.

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lunchbox
WalkScore has similar functionality (click on "My Commutes"):

<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>

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

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exue
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)

~~~
Yen
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.

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

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igorgue
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.

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rdl
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.

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brechin
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.

~~~
protomyth
It doesn't seem to pick up the jumps in time of stuff like 394->94 though.

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ShabbyDoo
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.

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bryanjclark
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
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.

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yarone
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
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
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.

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madiator
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?

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peapicker
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)

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jrockway
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.

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marchdown
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.

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faulkner
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.

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duck
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!

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

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

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frankydp
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.

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

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curlypaul924
It greatly overestimates driving times for Charleston, SC

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

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jszielenski
Very cool site!

