This was something I built while trying to look for housing in Toronto that was decently transit-accessible to my office while still cheap.
The backend is written in Rust. It parses public GTFS data from transit agencies and performs a simple heuristics-based BFS on the bus lines to calculate how long to reach all points in a city.
The frontend uses React and Mapbox GL to render each individual road segment based on how long it takes to reach.
This project was a great excuse to learn Rust, deployments, and mapping. The source code is here if you are interested: http://github.com/econaxis/time2reach
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map
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"
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 more options than I thought I had, partly because I didn't think about small towns with a train station.
There's also https://www.chronotrains.com which was another inspiration when building this project too.
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 set origin makes sense, but hover to set a destination is a bit weird, for two reasons: a. There's no way to "lock" a destination by clicking, so I can't pick a route I want to see and fix my view on it. The UI feels jittery as a result. b. In some cases (I'm looking at NYC), loading the route to the hovered destination hangs for several seconds. I don't know if this is just an issue because your server is overloaded, but it's a weird state to be in.
I'd consider: 1) adding a loading state when the route to the destination is being computed, 2) enable clicking a point to lock viewing that route, 3) maybe disabling the hover interaction entirely, though if it were performant, it would be pretty nice to have.
2. The "arrival time" concept is a slightly odd. I'd prefer to just see the amount of time it'll take to get to a destination, rather than an arrival time based on a particular starting time. I don't think anyone's going to use this to plan a specific route at a specific time; instead, they'll use it to explore locations of interest, and explore how long it'll take to get to various destinations. I see you show the trip duration in the bottom-left, but having it be an arrow pointing to a gradient spectrum is much harder to parse than just saying "27 minutes".
3. The fade effect on the side panel is a bit weird. It does draw more attention to the map, but the side panel is still occluding my view, and having it faded just makes the text very hard to read. I'd consider making it un-faded, but adding some way to collapse it.
1. Yes I think "locking" makes sense. The entire action of viewing the paths to different destinations still needs to be polished up, especially for the mobile version as well. When I tried it before posting to HN it was instant (30ms) but now it seems to be extra laggy because the CPU is maxed. I just upgraded the server from 4 -> 16 cpus, so let's hope that does something haha.
2. 100%
3. Agree as well. I chose the easiest solution when developing (and I also develop on a large monitor so it's harder to notice the occlusion), but adding a hide toggle would certainly have been better.
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.
If anyone has lived or at least visited places like Tokyo, Japan or Shanghai, China, you probably understand what I am referring to.
This will make their requests for more money/raises/etc seem absolutely insane when you compare what these countries/cities/agencies do WRT to transporting millions of people efficiently every single day - and not to mention just how clean such systems are.
When you go through stations in HK - you see well-uniformed cleaning folks all over the place.
In general, population density in East Asia is far higher than in the US.
Europe is not immune either, they would've followed the US's footsteps entirely if it weren't for the 1973 oil shock, which hit them harder than the US.
If you look at a top 10 list of best transit systems, you’ll see medium density cities like Oslo and Helsinki right beside Tokyo and Hong Kong.
Or within the USA, compare Miami to Seattle. The only difference is that one city decided to build mass transit and the other didn’t.
It’s entirely possible to build an appropriate transit system for any type of city.
Today I'm stuck on a tram for an hour and the tram company did not even tell us what happened or when would we be unstuck.
(I initially thought they were just bookmarks/shortcuts to some good demos then I realized they influenced the traffic sources checkbox at the bottom so they had to determine what the map showed rather than merely index it.)
Like, if I want to buy something big from Walmart or Costco (to keep to generic shop names) and it does not matter if I am on a train/metro/subway for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, but it totally does matter number of transport switches of bus->subway) and walking is really bad.
So, it would make sense to go to a very distant shop, but that is right opposite the direct train.
Does anything like this exist (for any city really)? The algorithm must be quite similar, but with different graph steps weighted differently depending on method of movement.
For example, when choosing the best route, it penalizes every transfer by 120 seconds [1]. Therefore, a route that takes 2 minutes longer is equivalent to one transfer.
It'd be cool to have a tool where you can dynamically change these settings, and maybe even have different transfer penalties depending on if you're transferring inside a station vs walking outside.
[1]: https://github.com/econaxis/time2reach/blob/main/src/formatt...
For example, there are many parts of Brooklyn where no transit lines are directly connected and you have to go into Manhattan first, meaning if you took the train it would take 1+ hours, versus bus (30 minutes) or biking (15 minutes).
Edit: Though, CityMapper doesn't actually provide a travel time map, alas.
I started using Transit App more often for the mixed-modes routing. It even supports bike shares/scooters, so sometimes it suggests new routes based on scooter -> subway -> scooter which is much faster than bus -> subway -> bus.