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

opentimes.org

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

#12

Post by ctrlp »

ctrlp wrote: post #10

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/

Would be great to have multiple layers of times so you can plan out possible routes over days.

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

#15

Post by simonw »

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;

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

#16

Post by itissid »

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.

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

#17

Post by dfsnow »

bobthepanda wrote: post #7

Any plans on adding public transit?

In the next year or so maybe. The biggest obstacles to adding public transit are:

- Collecting all the necessary scheduling data (e.g. GTFS feeds) for every transit system in the county. Not insurmountable since there are services that do this currently.

- Finding a routing engine that can compute nation-scale travel time matrices quickly. Currently, the two fastest open-source engines I've tried (OSRM and Valhalla) don't support public transit for matrix calculations and the engines that do support public transit (R5, OpenTripPlanner, etc.) are too slow.

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

#18

Post by dfsnow »

p_ing wrote: post #8

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

It's just using OpenStreetMap tags for routing, so if a bridge is impassible by foot/bike according to OSM, then it won't be able to route there. See the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in New York as an example.

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

#20

Post by dfsnow »

simonw wrote: post #15

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_se…

Thanks! I hadn't seen anyone do it this way before with a very large, partitioned dataset, but it works shockingly well as long as you're not trying to `SELECT *` the entire table. Props to the DuckDB folks.

Eventually I plan to add some thin R and Python wrapper packages around the DuckDB calls just to make it easier for researchers.

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