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

Post by iscrewyou » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

john-titor wrote: post #21

Does something like this exist for Europe?

Post by rvnx » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 10:34 PM UTC

Post by simonw » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 10:50 PM UTC

dfsnow wrote: post #20

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.

Post by p_ing » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 11:14 PM UTC

dfsnow wrote: post #18

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.

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, Mar 17, 2025, 11:34 PM UTC

dfsnow wrote: post #27

hatthew wrote: post #25

Very cool! I love the interactive map, but have a couple UX suggestions: I usually expect most features of a map to be zoom invariant, with the exception of level of detail. Having the colormap change is surprising, particularly that longer time buckets simply disappear as I zoom in. The two problems with this are that any time I zoom in or out I now have to double check the color key in case it's changed, and if I w…

These are great suggestions, thank you! I played around with a single static colormap for all scales but couldn't find one that worked well/looked good. Perhaps I'll add a slider that lets you manually select the values of the legend. The second suggestion is a no-brainer. I'll definitely get that added.