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Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

wanhala.net

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Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#31

Post by aaron-lebo »

benkarst wrote: post #25

Genius. My only comment is in how you measure the value of an address. It seems very likely that your algorithm would converge to areas that are only centrally located. Perhaps it could be improved if the algorithm took an input of common routes and times, then tried to find an optimal location for these routes. This way the algorithm could be scaled as needed and provide a more realistic scenario. Is this something…

Isn't his algorithm pretty bluntly designed to do this?

So I did my own analysis: I calculated the travel time from every address to every other address in Helsinki around 7:30-8:00am (about 30 billion searches total!). Then I calculated the (weighted) average travel time to anywhere in the city, using amount of jobs in the target area as weight.

That would seemingly bias towards centrally-located addresses (travel time & number of jobs), and his heat maps seem to show this. I believe you could pretty easily duplicate what he's doing with a few dozen randomly sampled routes. Or is there more to it?

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#33

Post by alkonaut »

I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time into the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I What I really wanted to do was find "underpriced areas" where commutes are faster than house prices indicate.

In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A tuesday morning 8 am commute) to a fixed central address. Then I plotted the times in a heatmap in the format Google maps uses and made a map overlay with the heat map.

It makes a nice spiral galaxy like map where the commuter train stations make little islands of short commute time far away from the city.

http://commutemap.azurewebsites.net/

(Static pic if you don't want to zoom in it and eat my free azure bandwidth... http://prnt.sc/e57bsc). Thinking about it now the dang thing ended up being completely static so it should be possible to just host for free somewhere (github?) rather than cloud. Uses my msdn "testing" sub now...

Outcome: bought place in the orange/red area and started working from home instead :)

Limitations: 1) target address is fixed, new target (e.g. new job location) needs a whole new map. But central stockholm is pretty small and walkable so this works pretty well if your office is central. 2) Interpolation between known points/addresses uses no kind of path finding. It assumes you can walk e.g. 200m in a straight line from an address to the closest bus stop. That might not be what you want to do if it e.g. means crossing water...

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#34

Post by muninn_ »

alkonaut wrote: post #33

I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time into the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I What I really wanted to do was find "underpriced areas" where commutes are faster than house prices indicate. In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A…

That's cool. Could I bother you for more information on how to do this? I'd like to try that for where I live.

Thanks

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#36

Post by alkonaut »

muninn_ wrote: post #34
alkonaut wrote: post #33

I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time into the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I What I really wanted to do was find "underpriced areas" where commutes are faster than house prices indicate. In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A…

That's cool. Could I bother you for more information on how to do this? I'd like to try that for where I live. Thanks

I'll dig through the source tomorrow. Check back.

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#37

Post by elsherbini »

jabl wrote: post #27

Nice. Nitpick: Rainbow (jet) color maps can be confusing. Better to use a perceptually uniform one such as viridis, see e.g. https://bids.github.io/colormap/

And if you don't like the green, you can use different flavors of cubehelix family color spaces[0].

[0] https://jiffyclub.github.io/palettable/cubehelix/

[1] http://www.ifweassume.com/2013/05/cubehelix-or-how-i-learned...

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#38

Post by dmd »

alkonaut wrote: post #33

I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time into the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I What I really wanted to do was find "underpriced areas" where commutes are faster than house prices indicate. In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A…

Error 403 - This web app is stopped.

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#39

Post by alkonaut »

dmd wrote: post #38
alkonaut wrote: post #33

I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time into the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I What I really wanted to do was find "underpriced areas" where commutes are faster than house prices indicate. In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A…

Error 403 - This web app is stopped.

Thanks for the heads up - will try to find a new home. It's on my "not for production" azure sub in which they apparently kill any app with a suspicious amount of traffic.

Re: Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki

#40

Post by lvanhala »

padthai wrote: post #30
lvanhala wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately not. I created it with various programs I've written for my data visualisation videos ( https://www.youtube.com/user/laurivanhala )

Your maps are gorgeous. Would you mind to share which tileset are you using in the Helsinki map?

Thanks! The Helsinki map is just a normal styled google map
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