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Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
81–90 of 97 posts
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#82This is amazing. I'd love if it could include:
1. Percent cancellations of lines (past 30d, past 1 year)
2. Average & deviation of delay (past 30d, past 1 year)
I think these factors could be used to identify unreliable lines. For example, looking at my commute line, it seems like I could get into the city in 50ish minutes but I know most of the times I get on the train from door to door it has been recently very unreliable with the most recent times being ~1hr min door to door.
We also have a lot of problems with cancellations on my way home.
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Population density makes a huge difference. The more people live in a city, the more funds the government has to invest to get a better transportation system. In general, population density in East Asia is far higher than in the US.
This is a chicken and egg problem, stop making excuses for Western governments. Nearly all US cities had streetcars and dense walkable downtowns. There are pictures of this. They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies, as well as eager house buyers who wanted cheap FHA loans. (Only available to whites) Europe is not immune either, they would've followed the US's footsteps entirely if it were…
I know you didn't name a city, but since everyone says this about Los Angeles due to Roger Rabbit, I'll zoom in on LA. The LA street cars, Pacific Electric and LA Railways, were operated by Henry Huntington to sell real estate and were increasingly unprofitable over time. This definitely wasn't helped by increasing competition from private automobiles, the 1910-20s version of rideshare called "jitneys", and local buses, but the streetcars weren't there as a charitable public service and rarely reinvested in itself. In 1925-1926, they proposed having LA city fund expansion and rapid transit, but the public and press at the time were very against elevated lines and increased taxes. There was no shortage of racism (as evidenced by voters destroying half of Chinatown to build Union Station), and LA Times infamously called elevated lines "four miles of hideous, clattering, dusty, dirty, dangerous, street-darkening overhead trestles." That basically sealed the streetcars' fate, and what the car industry did decades later was picking apart their corpses.
I'm sure that Roger Rabbit might be more true for some cities, but I dislike that LA and other cities cling on to this. It excessively absolves everyone else -- politicians, press, homeowners, and PE/LARy themselves -- of their own fault. They could've saved their transit system like London did in the 1920-30s. Even today every SFR owner seems to prefer pointing at the Roger Rabbit story rather than looking in the mirror. Thank god for AB2097 and other new laws that address low density.
Sources -- basically any source that's not Roger Rabbit will tell you the same thing:
* http://scsra.org/library/rapid-transit-history/
* https://laist.com/news/entertainment/union-station-history
* https://www.vox.com/2015/5/7/8562007/streetcar-history-demis...
* This entire book; the preview pages have a lot of pertinent parts: https://books.google.com/books?id=OfTlph3cXoQC
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#84Nice! Once upon a time I did something very similar. https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/visualizing_commute_tim... AFAICT the only reliable source of commute and transit times is Google Maps. To be useful it requires real traffic data. Unfortunately Google jacked up the prices way too high to be useful. My dream is a service for building isochrone maps with full support for walking/biking/transit/driving.
Google doesn't generate traffic data for public transit services; they buy it from the agencies that run those services. You can go directly to them for it.
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#85This is super cool! I particularly like that you render the route along transit lines to reach each destination, which is differentiated from other isochrone maps I've seen. I would love to use this while hunting for apartments in a large city. I do think there are a number of things you could do to improve the UX here. Hope this doesn't come across as too harsh, but here are some suggestions... 1. Double-click to se…
>2. The "arrival time" concept is a slightly odd.
There's nothing odd about it. Your arrival time entirely depends on the train schedule, and you can only arrive at your destination at certain discrete times because of this.
>I don't think anyone's going to use this to plan a specific route at a specific time;
I use Google Maps to do this exact thing all the time. I need to be at a certain place at a certain time, so I set the place and arrival time and have it plot a route and show me all the available options.
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#86Public service announcement - these kind of maps are known as isochrone maps and they're anything but new, but are (IMHO criminally) unpopular. They're extremely helpful when house hunting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
Yeah I would have noticed that the place I’m renting for a month in Montreal is in dark shades of blue!
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#87Seems like it is missing PATH (NJ NYC)
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#88The following site works for The Netherlands (not just Amsterdam): https://mapitout.iamsterdam.com/ It has some minor limitations to select the time (has to one of the predefined options). That can be worked around by changing the URL parameter. It can also map out multiple locations and see the overlap. It's fairly useful to see where you want to live while taking e.g. the office location into account. It gave me mo…
Hey, that's super interesting. Put in my and my SO's current distances, and the overlap seems pretty accurate (though smaller than I was hoping for!)
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They were destroyed in the 1950s due to pressure from car/oil lobbies Popular explanation but largely false. They were destroyed because people quit using them.
Why and how did people quit using them? Suppose you're in a world where the interstate highway system hasn't been built and subway trains are the dominant mode of transportation, and you would like to stop taking trains to get to places, what do you do? Walk? Bike? Ride a horse? Drive offroad in a car with a manual transmission and no seatbelts or airbags, with no gas stations in between? Seems like you'd be S.O.L. u…
People use e-mail more than snail mail nowadays too. Funny, that.
Re: Show HN: I built a transit travel time map
#90Public service announcement - these kind of maps are known as isochrone maps and they're anything but new, but are (IMHO criminally) unpopular. They're extremely helpful when house hunting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
They are to a point, I think.
I made one of these in the past when looking for places to live in London. The ultimate conclusion was that you could have inexpensive, short travel time, or nice/safe, choose two.
I gave up after realising that the market signals worked - if ignoring Central London it'd pretty much just be "more expensive = nicer"