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dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
svcphr · a year ago
How did you decide on routing engine? I’ve used Graphhopper in the past — is OSRM an improvement?
dfsnow · a year ago
I actually tried a couple different engines before landing on OSRM. I started with R5 (since it can also do public transit) then switched to Valhalla.

The main limiting factor was speed. Basically all routing engines except for OSRM are too slow to compute continent-scale travel time matrices. For reference, it took Valhalla around a week to finish 3 billion point-to-point pairs. OSRM did the same calculation in about 2 hours.

I can't speak to Graphhopper since I haven't tried it. Maybe something to test in the future!

dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
hatthew · a year ago
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 want to find a travel time for something far away I need to zoom in to find the destination and then back out to see the travel time. Perhaps you can let the user manually choose the colormap granularity/range, or find some way to have a colormap that works at all scales?

Second suggestion, related, is to display the travel time next to the geography ID in the bottom left corner. This would mitigate the issues with getting a good colormap, since I can then just hover over a geography to get its time anywhere that the colormap isn't sufficient.

dfsnow · a year ago
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.

dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
simonw · a year ago
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;

dfsnow · a year ago
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.

dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
pimlottc · a year ago
Looks cool. Please allow high max zoom levels, it’s hard to see individual street details on mobile.
dfsnow · a year ago
Good point, will do!
dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
p_ing · a year ago
It seems that it ignores bridges over rivers making the travel time wildly inaccurate.
dfsnow · a year ago
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.
dfsnow commented on Show HN: OpenTimes – Free travel times between U.S. Census geographies   opentimes.org... · Posted by u/dfsnow
bobthepanda · a year ago
Any plans on adding public transit?
dfsnow · a year ago
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.

u/dfsnow

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