
A new kind of map: it’s about time - uptown
https://blog.mapbox.com/a-new-kind-of-map-its-about-time-7bd9f7916f7f
======
shurcooL
I think this is great, but I can see it being potentially improved further if
there was a temporary overlay of the physical map whenever you hover over a
destination.

Basically, I feel that completely removing the physical map is okay until
you've picked a target. Then, having to click on it to be able to see what the
route looks like (which streets to take, etc.) is higher friction than I'd
like. Instead, imagine if hovering would give you a route overlay, and as you
hover your mouse over multiple places you're considering, you're already aware
of the physical directions as well.

Having to click back and forth feels quite constraining.

This is simply feedback on a way I think it could be improved further, not to
take away from how good it already is.

~~~
erikb
I think the idea is to keep mobile and desktop in sync here. And mobile
doesn't have a "finger over" event I think.

~~~
JimmyAustin
Peek/Pop works on iOS for 6S and above.

------
nerdponx
_By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects
the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes
that way” versus “ten minutes the other.”_

Speak for yourself! I feel way more confident getting around when I know the
actual geography.

~~~
chippy
As a geographer I cringed. The article was written in a way that made it sound
a bit more important than it actually is, and I think that quote was one of
it. A designer finding geography and cartography for the first time. It IS
good stuff though. Maybe the writing is stylised and maybe not as humble as
usual techy writing?

People do think about space and the environment in spatial terms and also in
time. This article is basically replaying the same failure that Google is
showing - that maps only have an economic value. "Pizza in San Francisco" has
been a meme in geospatial hacker land for over a decade and this is another
incarnation of it. People think about space in non economic terms more than in
terms of how to sell stuff via advertisements. We think about safety,
attractiveness, how accessible it is, whats the parking like, who we are with,
where next we are going to, what is the ambiance like, how will it be when we
try to get home, crime levels, any nearby arts and events on, is the football
on at the stadium, is it a weekday or a weeknight, is it near a university, is
it during term time, what kind of people are nearby, are the streets well lit,
how noisy are the streets. etc. etc.

Now - this doesn't discount the work. I think that a 2D map - the paper
analogy onto digital form also isn't good, so any research and attempt to
think about what's good and working is worth looking at. Care should be taken
when giving psychological or psychogeographical points to such different
designs.

~~~
nerdponx
Can you explain the "Pizza in San Francisco" meme? Not sure I get the joke.

~~~
Terretta
What “problem” is a young single white male developer in San Francisco trying
to solve?

What problems are (NOT (young, single, white, male, developer, in San
Francisco)) trying to solve?

What is the Venn diagram of those problem sets? The market size? The impact?

If aiming to build a business that works outside the Silicon Valley bubble,
you can go wildly wrong by designing for, appealing to, and getting traction
in the tiny set.

~~~
Terretta
Ha, for instance today: [https://blog.bodega.ai/so-about-our-name-
aa5bff63a92d](https://blog.bodega.ai/so-about-our-name-aa5bff63a92d)

------
arafalov
I would love a distance map that includes public transport travel time. For
example, if I live close to metro/subway/train and I want to do really big
grocery shopping. It would be interesting to see the nearest grocery that
includes those I could reach by jumping on the metro and with minimal total
walking.

It may be more effective to catch the train to a grocery in a completely
different part of town than to walk 30 minutes to the one in your own
neighborhood.

~~~
jka
Applied to the maps in the article, this could end up introducing animation to
the chart. If your local light rail arrives every 30 minutes, then your ETA to
arrive at various different grocery stores is gradually changing, drawing
nearer to the center, and climbs up a steep (half hour) cliff when you aren't
close enough to the station to catch the train.

You could even colour the destinations by level of urgency - blue for
destinations where you can casually stroll to the station, or red for ones
where you really need to leave right away to catch the train.

------
hnnsj
How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once
you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure
out how to get there.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
Well it still maintains some geographic info by keeping the direction. This
helps for instance in identifying clusters of places, so user can think: "If I
go that way there a N other places nearby too". Also the cardinal directions
are still preserved, which help to interface with user's preexisting
geographic knowelege.

~~~
hnnsj
Well, to some degree, yes. Maybe it's even mostly true. But the fact that
point A and B are close to point C by some mode of transportation does not
guarantee that they are close to each other. They might be separated by some
geographic feature like a river, mountain or large road that doesn't separate
them from C. Or the transportation options between A and C and between B and C
may be excellent, but horrible between A and B. And so on. You need a normal
map, or very good prior knowledge of the geography indeed, to know that.

~~~
jmilloy
If you click on A, you will be able to see if it is close to B or not. Or,
more generally, clicking on a few points in a cluster on this map should give
you an idea of whether you'll be able to travel easily between places once you
get there. So I don't think it's as useless as you are making it out to be.

~~~
hnnsj
Then again, I fail to see how this is a major improvement over just clicking
the first location of interest in an ordered list to generate a new list etc.

My main point is that to me, you're either interested in going to the closest
location from where you are, and you'd probably want a brief description of
each location to filter out points of interest to you. A list is just as good
if not better (since you can quickly glance more information about each place)
for that purpose.

Or else you're interested in the geography of the different locations or their
exact spatial relationship and then you need a normal map anyway.

Sure, this is a neat geographic data visualization, but I just can't see
myself using it in a real world situation.

------
sulam
Isochronic maps are pretty awesome. However, an isochrone-only projection that
ignores geography is prone to the same sort of errors that the alternative
creates. One simple example that is personal to me -- when I moved from SF to
the East Bay, my commute into the city shortened by ~10 minutes because of
where I'd been living (out by Ocean Beach) vs where I moved to and the nature
of driving and public transit in the SF Bay Area. And yet as far as my friends
who lived and worked in SF were concerned, I was now in this mystical place
that they didn't really spend any time in or know much about (the perception
of Oakland is also contributing here).

It'd be interesting to take travel data and cluster it such that you end up
with an isopsychochronic projection. Commute visualizations I've seen end up
feeling kind of close.

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-
revea...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/us-commutes-reveal-new-
economic-megaregions-map/)

------
xahrepap
A bit off topic. What I really want in map software (specifically for finding
my way): know that I know my way around certain areas. The beginning of my
commute no matter where I go is full of turns every minute or two. It makes
listening to audio books impossible because interrupted with "in 100 feet..."
Constant.

Just day "go to $MAJORPOINT" then start giving me step by step directions.

~~~
askvictor
Why not just set navigation audio to alerts only (at least in Google maps)

~~~
mos_basik
I use Waze on my daily commute not because I don't know the way to work, but
because I would like to be routed around traffic as well as possible.

Setting audio to alerts works when a traffic situation develops while I am
driving and the optimal route changes on the fly (generating an alert). But,
if there is a pre-existing situation when I start that's changing the route in
a couple of places from the "normal" route I get 80%of the time, alerts will
only notify me of it about it five seconds after I miss the unusual exit, when
it starts finding a new route.

Of course the simple fix is to get a phone mount and just look at the route
whenever you want - but then you're leaving the screen on constantly, or
unlocking it at arm's reach while driving.

------
microcolonel
I wonder how it would look if you directly distorted the map by travel time.

~~~
qznc
This. I was hoping for some weird pictures of distorted maps.

~~~
microcolonel
For what it's worth, I think it would be computationally quite hard. You would
have to pick a set of points and maybe _isomap_ them from three dimensions (x,
y, and time) to two, then find a visually acceptable cage transformation using
those points as anchors. You'd have to do this for each query.

~~~
qznc
The Isochrones [0] mentioned in the article include basically all the
necessary information. I guess a capable GPU-shader programmer could easily
render the distortion in real time. (Hint Hint Hacker News for a cool weekend
project)

[0]
[https://www.mapbox.com/bites/00156/#10/51.6840/-0.1480](https://www.mapbox.com/bites/00156/#10/51.6840/-0.1480)

~~~
nemetroid
The problem isn't in getting the data for the transformation but to figure out
which transformation to use. It's not possible to do in the general case,
imagine e.g. an infinitely quick circle line. Where do you put the part of the
map that's inside the circle?

~~~
TFortunato
I think as far as figuring out the transformation to use on the a generic map
I would:

0) ignore stuff like "infinitely quick" since that isn't realistic for what we
are doing :-)

1) For the map I am displaying, pick a handful of points of interest to hse as
controls, as well as my current location.

2) Use existing data we already have for stuff like direction routing to get
travel times between all the pairs in our points of interest.

3) Draw a weighted graph, where each vertex is one of our points of interest
and each edge is weighted by travel time. The initial position of each point
should be it's geographic position, but we can then use an existing graph
layout algorithm that uses an energy-based method (e.g. pretend the edges are
springs) to deform the graph. This way each point will end up with its
distance being proportional to travel time.

4) Using initial points as our input control points, and their location in the
graph as output cobtrol points, use any number of image warping algorithms put
there to calculate our warp / morph / deformation field.

5) Apply to initial map image.

I don't know how well it would work in practice but seems like a reasonable
first stab at it! :-)

EDIT: Apologies for typo, fat fingers on mobile!

~~~
ballenarosada
There's no reason your distance graph should correspond to any continuous
mapping of the plane. Two distances constrain a third point to one of two
spots. Add a third distance and unless you get lucky, there will be no valid
corresponding point in the codomain.

~~~
TFortunato
That is absolutely true, and I fully admit that there isn't going to be a
perfect way to do this unless you are very lucky. I'm only curious if you
could use a method like this to make maps like shown above at
[http://www.spiekermann-
wegener.com/mod/time/time_e.htm](http://www.spiekermann-
wegener.com/mod/time/time_e.htm) where it's approximately correct in a
somewhat useful way.

My gut says it's probably more realistic to do this for large scale maps (say
between major cities, 100s of miles, where distance is pretty proportional to
travel time). Once you get down to the city / street level, yeah it probably
gets real dicey with high variation in travel speeds depending on the
particular road and how routes are laid out, and you just aren't going to get
pretty triangles fitting together nicely :-P.

In any case its a fun problem to think about!

------
Paradox0
The location of the isochrones themselves are a function of time, depending on
current traffic levels, when the next bus is scheduled to arrive, etc. Hence,
this map can't be static. To really be accurate, it needs to collect that data
and auto-refresh itself in short intervals.

------
_h_o_d_
I love this idea, and also its acknowledgement of prior time maps for rail and
other psychogeographic forebears. Its ability to put in relevant data in
rational time-based space stops some of those issues that make us take a
longer or particular direction because of habit, fear, or misunderstanding of
the timespace about us. Nonetheless as a map-lover, I'd love to see how more
contextual information could be added for serendipitous and geographical
observation.

------
npolet
This is a pretty neat idea, and I could see myself using this in day to day
life.

It's nice to see real thought, study and execution into new ways of portraying
things that have the possibility of becoming stale. While maps and their
functionalities are very much "still in development" with many developers
adding new features to them... most of these "new features" don't try to
rethink how we see and use them. They just extend the feature set instead of
stopping and trying to re-think what a map is and what it is supposed to do.

~~~
Boothroid
You don't think there are thousands of people working on exactly this stuff
already?! There is deep research into this in academia and the private sector
which has been going on for decades :|

------
tobib
Seems like the rate limit of api.foursquare.com has been exceeded.

~~~
lemonlyman516
We're working on it! Check back soon

------
crooked-v
This is a cool idea, but what about combining it with public transit? In my
city, the bus and light rail lines affect my decision-making in all kinds of
weird ways. For example:

\- Going a few miles east (on the light rail line) is much, much faster than
the same distance plus a mile north or south.

\- Some places on the inner east side of the river take me longer to get to
than places further out that are on a bus line.

\- Going to the northwest part downtown takes me longer than going to the
north part, even though they're both the same distance from home, because the
transit lines run in an ⅂ shape.

------
sinaa
This is both clever and useful!

Is it possible to present a resized version of the route to each path
underneath each target? (or perhaps show that on hover)

I understand that this would mean having overlapping map snippets of different
sizes (with different centres), but some visual representation of the route to
take could be nice.

Currently, the UX of having to click each target to see the path reduces the
usability (having to go back and forth between the suggestions is tedious).

------
iamben
This is absolutely amazing. If I could use this with a more intelligent search
(pub / bar return different things, for instance - whereas I want to search
for "places I can get a beer"), this would be fantastic.

~~~
baccredited
Agree. Show me a time map for nearby draft beers with Beer Advocate or
Ratebeer scores and I would use this all the time. Bonus points to restrict to
certain styles like IPA, lagers, etc. Untappd could actually do this if they
wanted.

------
TheCoreh
Really interesting that the "time distance" is more or less linear with
walking/biking, but in a car it has a non linear relationship: For further
places you take a highway, which requires some extra distance but adds a
significant speed boost. Having the dots shift in position when changing modes
of transportation was really insightful.

------
opportune
As a user, I would find an isochronic map much more useful than the weird
radial design they want to provide. To provide the level of precision that the
radial map does without destroying our eyes with colors, they could substitute
a color gradient with some sort of border around "reference times" such as 5
minutes.

The author thinks that the time-only maps address the root concern, which is
"how fast can I get somewhere." But that's not entirely true: there are areas
where I live that I would rather go to than others. If I search for sushi and
I see one place in a crime-ridden neighborhood, a second place in the middle
of nowhere, and a third place in the "trendy" section of my city where most of
the rest of the food is good, I'm going to the third place if they're all the
same distance (and probably even if the third place is farther than the first
two, to an extent).

~~~
HeavyStorm
Just a cool thing to notice:

> I'm going to the third place if they're all the same distance (and probably
> even if the third place is farther than the first two, to an extent).

By distance, you probably meant time to get there.

------
lkbainbridge
It’s a really cool visual, but not too practical for points of interest
searching on websites with more than a few points, although good if density is
low and travel time area is small. Take a look at TravelTime platform that can
do 1000s of points in milliseconds - here’s an example using the TravelTime
API for the same location and you can drag the marker about and it quickly
recalculates points of interest or expand it out up to 90 mins journey time.
[https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929...](https://app.traveltimeplatform.com/#/search/0_lng=-122.34929&0_tt=15&0_time=d1506011559544&0_title=1st%20Ave%2C%20Seattle%2C%20Washington%2098121%2C%20United%20States&0_lat=47.61466&poi=shop)

------
Mz
I like it and this is cool to see. I have a Certificate in GIS and did some
reading at one time about the inherent challenges involved in dealing with
time in data visualization. This seems to be a fairly elegant solution.

 _In city centers with a lot of walking traffic, you may see maps overlaid
with progressively larger circles, to estimate travel time based on simple
physical distance. But this assumes that people move like crows fly: that
there’s a straight-line road for anywhere we want to go, through concrete
walls and over lakes, without traffic ever to slow us down. In an urban
setting, none of these are practical assumptions to make._

That isn't limited to urban settings. They are not practical assumptions to
make in any setting.

------
mholmes680
Its cool, and I can see the usefulness. After I used it for 5 mins I started
thinking "hey I really could care less which direction I need to travel for
lunch anyways", so its doing its stated goal there.

My only issue is that they define it as a "map". Its, well, its not. Its a
useful tool, but a map tells you how to go there, and this is not that (until
you click on something, so that second piece is a map fine). I can concede its
a map in the sense that multiple places plotted are still direction-ally
related to each other, but that's counter to going ahead and throwing out the
map-streets in the first place.

------
aaroninsf
As a user, I would prefer two options: • an isochrone preserving relevant
geometry geography and transit • a relative time ordering like this, but with
the X and Y dimensions subject to change based on my current interests.

I.e. I appreciate radius from center as a very useful representation of travel
time.

But I would liberate X and Y to be things such as rating and cost (to give two
likely examples).

Once you distort space so you might as well go all-in (in this view) and let
it pack in two more dimensions.

The resulting clusterings would be very interesting and useful I imagine.

------
danso
Pretty neat. I frequently use the example of Yelp's list and map views as an
example of how maps aren't always better, even as they are more appealing
compared to a text list. But I frequently use the list view because I can sort
by distance, while still seeing the other important info (such as star rating,
cost, food type).

But distance isn't the only important geospatial factor. Frequently I want to
find a place to eat/drink that's on the way to another destination (such as a
movie theater). This kind of chrono map would be more useful in a new city in
which I don't know that a place 0.2 mi away to the west involves crossing an
interstate. In a setting I'm familiar with, it's probably not particularly
useful on mobile (given the limited dimensions for showing points and text
labels), but could be great on print displays. It'd allow designers to show
geospatial/time info without also having to render a full map.

On the topic of Yelp and other listing services, maybe some refinements could
be made to make lists more geospatially useful. No reason why the list view
has to show just distance, rather than time traveled. Or to include a filter
option for direction, so that I can just see things west or south of me. It's
pretty frustrating sometimes having to switch back and forth between list and
map.

------
OlympusMonds
I vaguely built something similar for Sydney, but in showing how good/bad
public transport is than driving (hint: it's way worse to catch PT):
[http://www.publictransport-or-drive.com/](http://www.publictransport-or-
drive.com/)

It pretty much makes a isochrone maps all over the city, and gets google
public transport and driving times and creates a ratio. I've started to work
on a better version 2, but so far not much work.

------
sixdimensional
I love this kind of thinking.

I've always wondered even further about this - how you take this and extend it
to 3 dimensions + time. In terms of maps, that would also help you with
elevation or other obstacles that might slow you down from a straight line
path.

Certainly, with the processing power and capacity today, we have the
capability of knowing not only the two dimensional direction and the time it
takes, but even the three dimensional position plus time.

I like to think of this crazy idea like a 3-D video recorder (maybe)...
something that records positions of all objects in the specified space in
slices of time, and can reconstruct any such slice and analyze the relative
position of objects in space over time to each other.

I am not sure how such a technology would be made... capturing all the
positions of everything in slices of time. I think we can do it with 3-D
simulations, but not sure how we could record such data for the real world
without modeling it in the virtual.

Still, this is such a cool direction and I for one like seeing people
experimenting with something that we take for granted so easily, the map. I
feel like everything that is amazing about time and space is somehow embodied
by maps - astronomy, time, geography, relativity, etc.

------
redthrowaway
I actually think this is a step too far, conceptually. The isochrone map
actually maps better to how I think about travel, and I would find it much
more useful.

------
pfarnsworth
I had this idea 15 years ago, although I was thinking you could manipulate the
visual distance on the map to make it look physically closer, kind of like a
topological map. It would take the current traffic, etc to take into account
how close things were in time vs distance.

But I was never smart enough to implement it. This goes a bit along the way
but hopefully someone comes along and implements that, I think I would find it
very useful.

------
zeppelin101
Truly an impressive concept, but I didn't find it to be particularly accurate
in Los Angeles. I searched for Mexican food near me and nearly all it could
find were Chipotle locations. While I like Chipotle, this isn't quite ready
for primetime. Not sure where they're pulling the restaurant data from, but it
definitely isn't Google Maps, nor Yelp.

~~~
carlosedp
According to the post they fetch from Foursquare API.

------
rkuykendall-com
This is going to be fantastic for upper Manhattan. Google Maps / Yelp don't
understand that going north-south in Manhattan is so much easier than going
east/west. A place can be 10x further away in miles, but still be easier and
faster to get to.

------
xg15
The idea has something, but I'd hesitate to call something that completely
changes depending on on when, where and by whom it is viewed a map at all.

This is a nice tool to answer the descision-making question "where can I find
a good restaurant to get to in reasonable proximity?" that the article talked
about - but I'm worried about the undertones in it that were equating it to an
actual map.

I'm not sure if that's their idea but if they are thinking about using this to
_replace_ geographical maps, they should stop that thought quickly - there is
an awful lot of information that a geographical map gives you that this
doesn't.

------
sytelus
This is good idea but could be done differently. One major issue is that time
is not only the optimization criteria. For example, if there are two places
both 30 minutes away but one requires me to take tons of turns through narrow
streets while other is straight forward highway driving then I would chose the
later. Hack I would later even if cost was 25% more. Others may have some
other criteria, for example, eating near river shore instead of in dirty back
alley.

The bottom line is that you can't just throwaway physical maps. One way to
marry your idea in physical may might be to color code places according to how
far they are.

------
dionidium
It's also kind of interesting that you can draw some pretty strong inferences
about neighborhoods once all the geographic cruft is wiped away. For example,
from where I'm sitting in Midtown, Manhattan's east-side retail development
bias is clearly revealed by a search for "Starbucks:"

[https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW](https://imgur.com/0jXYeRW)

If you center on the Central West End in St. Louis, you can clearly see that
development has mostly happened in the western suburbs:

[https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK](https://imgur.com/yxnVkiK)

------
wyatte
"By removing literal geography, we now have a map that more closely reflects
the way we think about our environment: a cluster of restaurants “five minutes
that way” versus “ten minutes the other.”

Oh my.... They just invented the 'list'. Or better yet a list that drives map
interactions....oh my and an ordered list too! I could swear I did that like
10 years ago on google maps, but I guess it must have just been a dream.

Seriously, adding a fancy radius dial overlay doesn't really improve much over
a plain old ordered list.

------
Sniffnoy
Of course, distance on this map corresponds to travel time only so long as one
of the points is the center; for a multi-leg trip, it still essentially
requires manual inquiry and comparison.

------
Sir_Cmpwn
It'd be cool to see a similar map at relativistic scales that shows the
relationship between travel time for different speeds and the elapsed time at
the origin and destination.

------
reaperducer
Good for initial decision making, but worthless for actually helping someone
get somewhere, which is the function of a map. Perhaps this needs a different
name.

------
bradknowles
Not too bad, but the search needs to be less literal.

When I search for "sandwich", my neighborhood Subway should show up, even
though the word doesn't appear in the name.

When I search for "convenience" or "store", my neighborhood convenience store
should show up, even though those words do not appear in the name.

But I did discover a Whole Foods location that is even closer to my house than
the three others in town that I knew of. Cool!

~~~
flachsechs
this isn't a question of being less literal, it's a question of building a
search taxonomy and synonym database and tuning it for relevance, in this
case, in the restaurants vertical.

this is something a lot of people don't realize about search engines i.e.
yelp, angie's, etc. - they are tuned to fit the humans to the data, not vice
versa.

------
dlandis
It kind of reminds me of what Uber decided to do in their UberEats app, which
is organize restaurants by how long delivery will take and not say anything
about how many miles away the restaurant is or what its address is. You can't
sort by distance or display a map. So it ends up being really annoying if you
would rather deal with nearby restaurants you end up doing a lot of flipping
back and forth from google.

------
erikb
I've met with people from the Berlin mapbox team and feel they are a nice
bunch.

However this map idea also reflects my core impression. Really smart people
that provide constant high quality content (just look at the blog itself, how
it's designed, and the other posts), but not really a disruptive spirit.

Sie sind _nicht_ der Elefant im Porzelanladen, you could say. That is their
strength and their weakness.

~~~
lucb1e
"You are not the elephant in a cupboard full of porcelain", that means, by the
way.

~~~
jschwartzi
In the US we might say "you are not a bull in a china shop," which is in the
same spirit.

------
EGreg
Why not just have a list sorted by distance or that same travel time? The
concentric circles seem to make it more difficult to browse.

For an example, go to [https://groups.do](https://groups.do) , create an
account (can be fake) and then click New Group, select some Dining activity
and see the restaurants pop up sorted by distance. Done.

------
sirmike_
Personally this is not how I think about this kind of concept divorced from
the geography. But am glad there are tools to help express how I want to use
GIS info! [https://boundlessgeo.com/](https://boundlessgeo.com/) is a highly
customizable open source suite for GIS data as well.

------
rodolphoarruda
Refreshed my memory about when I was calling this "mobility circles" back in
2011. [http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-
circulos-d...](http://blog.rodolphoarruda.pro.br/2011/05/os-tres-circulos-da-
mobilidade.html) (portuguese)

------
StringyBob
A pet project I've wanted to do for ages is to hack up a very high-detail
(factoring in every road/footpath) isochrone map centred around my home, using
openstreetmap data and render the result for a printshop at e.g. 600dpi to
create a high quality map/poster

Any suggestions for the best (open) software to achieve this?

~~~
vinnieman232
Click on the live link here [https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-
next-applicat...](https://blog.mapbox.com/add-isochrones-to-your-next-
application-e9e84a62345f) for an example. Use the extension linked in the
article to create a high-resolution screenshot from a Mapbox GL Map canvas
object. [https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/](https://printmaps.mpetroff.net/)

------
nnain
I like that there're companies like Mapbox and CityMapper challenging Google
Maps and Apple Maps.

But giving a blank slate to a user and having them input a text query when
they open the App might not be the best idea. In my head I remember the places
around me using landmarks; the blank screen at the start makes me impatient.

------
cprayingmantis
I like your idea but as vizs go it's a bit misguided. Something 4 rings out in
one direction and 5 rings out in another would be hard to compare at a glance.
Instead you could make a directionless viz that's basically a bar graph that's
just as useful if your primary concern is distance in minutes.

------
munro
I wonder if it would be readable to overlay the distance map with the street
map, and connect the two with a line.

~~~
wavefunction
Or connect the paths along sidewalks etc that will get you there in the
claimed time.

------
npsimons
Something similar, but simpler: [https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-
travel.htm](https://www.freemaptools.com/how-far-can-i-travel.htm)

Very useful in constraining a search area based on how far you're willing to
commute when looking for a home.

------
quickthrower2
If you only care about time then direction is irrelevant. In which case just
listing the restaurants in order of travel time would be better.

What would be cool is instead of time you have a score that takes into account
time, cost (do I need an uber or will a bus do?) and variance (traffic delay
probability)

------
padobson
I'd like to see a version of this where you can input a list of errands -
work, groceries, daycare, gas, gym - and it distills all the travel into a
single dot. You pick the dot with the least amount of time and it gives you a
list of locations in the order you should travel.

------
alanbernstein
I've had a similar concept rattling around in my head for a while. Rather than
basing the time on travel distance from a point, you can base it on travel
distance from a route. Then results can be ranked by "on my home commute, how
far out of my way is this place?"

------
dgyes
I am finding it useful in realizing that some restaurants, stores are actually
closer than assumed. This visual removing roads, hills is useful. It would be
helpful to be able to toggle a normal map with all points, not just the
selected on.

------
karmakaze
City Block distance metric aka Taxicab geometry applies here.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicab_geometry)

------
justifier
I worked in a hostel for years and Europeans often noted how funny it was that
people from the states referred to distance in regards to time

ie, an 8 hour drive, or 20 minute walk

It was always fun to sit around and speculate as to why

~~~
toomanybeersies
I do that here in New Zealand for driving. It doesn't really mean much to say
that a town is 200 km away.

That 200 km could take anywhere from 2 hours to 3.5 hours to drive to,
depending on the road and terrain. The distance isn't actually very relevant.

The tourist guides here specifically mention this, that don't plan your travel
by distance, because 100 km in one place is not 100 km in another. In the old
road maps, they'd have a travel time matrix, rather than distance (like this
[0] except with times)

[0] [https://s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05e...](https://s3-us-
west-2.amazonaws.com/liftweightpushcode/10f05ed87720db9d6fc78df773f6b1ac569953eb.gif?1483922525)

------
udfalkso
Very neat idea!

I can't seem to run a search in my location in NY. "Find Me" changes the
address but the results are stuck in Seattle. I can't seem to change the query
term either.

------
VintageCool
My searches for food in Bellevue, WA found a Thai restaurant that closed 6
years ago (Tewada Thai), and a Mexican restaurant that left 2 years ago (Tres
Hermanos).

~~~
dhritzkiv
I noticed that for "lunch", "sandwich", "food" in Toronto as well. Strange,
since the demo claims to use the Foursquare API, but the same queries in the
app offer better/more relevant results.

------
TearsInTheRain
I have been waiting for something like this for housing searches. Suprisingly
hard to search within a specific commute time rather than search by
neighborhood

------
wutbrodo
This is a really cool idea but the live demo won't load for me when I put an
address in. Anyone else getting this to work on Chrome (61.0)/Linux?

------
amai
I want to see such a map around every apartment for rent.

------
ocdtrekkie
I haven't heard much about Mapbox before. Where do they get their data? Do
they buy it from another company or actually do the mapping themselves?

------
panic
This is really cool! I wonder what the other boundaries on the map (road,
neighborhood, city, etc.) would look like when projected onto the time view.

------
iamleppert
It would be cool if the directionality of the unit circle (northing/heading)
changed based upon gyro orientation, when viewed on a mobile device.

------
PascLeRasc
I think this is wonderful. I remember when people said talking about how far
something is in time units was a "Pittsburgh thing" ;)

------
k2xl
I'm getting 403 responses, hence the map isn't loading for me, anyone have
some interesting screenshots of it working?

------
piinbinary
For food, I'd like a map that allows me to minimize the sum of time spent
traveling and time spent waiting in line.

------
graphememes
It looks like a step backward from it's "prior art" that was installed in
Oakland.

------
rmdundon
Interesting concept. I like the overlay idea, but I think simply having that
as a standalone map would not be useful in other areas where distance as the
crow flies ≠ time traveled. Areas with large bodies of water (like adjacent
peninsulas), mountainous areas or areas with strange road infrastructure (Some
parts of Virginia).

Nonetheless, an interesting concept!

~~~
lemonlyman516
The distance changes as you change your mode of transportation - so barriers
would be taken into account for the time traveled.

------
wavefunction
Removing the geography seems great until you are trying to cross rivers or
highways.

~~~
danso
Ostensibly, these kind of maps imply the time-cost of those obstacles more
accurately than a standard map in which as-the-bird-flies distances are more
explicitly shown.

------
goodoldboys
This is fantastic - both in usefulness and in design. Very well done!

------
brosky117
I've never seen an isochronic map before. Those are legit!

------
pinot
Searching for pho gets you photography... kind of annoying :)

------
joelanman
not sure whether this gives much advantage over just listing the results in
order of travel time? It gives an indication of direction, but is that really
useful?

------
sengork
Interesting to see Melbourne Australia in some of the maps.

------
dcgoss
Clever title!

------
abpavel
In .. 7 .. minutes you wi reach your deatination .. in shady alley behind the
dumpster. But hey, it's close!

Cool idea though.

------
DonHopkins
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Chris Lightfoot's beautiful interactive time
travel maps that he did with MySociety and Stamen Design:

[http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html](http://v1.stamen.com/clients/mysociety.html)

MySociety Travel Time Maps

Interactive maps of travel time and housing prices in London

MySociety, an NGO which builds websites that give people simple, tangible
benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives, came to Stamen
with a remit to explore two fascinating datasets: median prices of homes
throughout London, and the time it takes to travel from one place to another
throughout the city.

[https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-
maps-a...](https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/more-travel-time-maps-and-
their-uses/)

[https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-
maps/](https://www.mysociety.org/2007/03/05/real-time-travel-maps/)

Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 — 11 February 2007) was an English scientist
and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at
e-democracy charity mySociety.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Lightfoot)

Sometimes, it’s more useful to know a journey time than it is to know the
distance.

That’s why people often refer to ‘an hour’s commute’ rather than ‘40 miles’.

Mapumental is a beautiful tool to show public transport travel times, from or
to a chosen postcode, on a timebanded map. These can be embedded in websites,
apps or online tools, or used for internal research purposes.

Transit-time maps, also known as isochrone maps, are not a new idea: there are
examples dating back hundreds of years. But the online technologies behind
Mapumental are new – and have unleashed a great many possibilities for all
kinds of users.

[https://www.mysociety.org/better-
cities/mapumental/](https://www.mysociety.org/better-cities/mapumental/)

Mapumental developed the project (site currently down for maintainance):

[http://www.mapumental.com/](http://www.mapumental.com/)

Stamen Design has done lots of really cool stuff with maps:

[http://v1.stamen.com/](http://v1.stamen.com/)

------
t_serpico
+1 for title

------
alphaalpha101
I think this would be far more useful as an overlay over a physical map than
just entirely replacing one.

By that, I mean.. think of isobars.

------
johansch
A de-cluttered version of this would work great in a car/auto context. "Show
me nearby supermarkets"

------
amelius
Come on, this is just a simple idea with lots of prior art. Nothing to brag
about (as the title does) or to build a business around, as anybody can make
such maps.

~~~
alex_g
As someone who has never seen this kind of map applied to a relevant use case,
I think there's a difference between having designed map like this vs building
a tool for everyone to benefit from a map like this.

