Show HN: Find rental flats based on commute time to your workplace (Switzerland) | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find rental flats based on commute time to your workplace (Switzerland)

wonsch.ch

78 pointspierre50 comments

I'm one of the creators. This was built in 40 hours at Hackzurich 2015 (www.hackzurich.com) and combines the following:

    * The largest rent database of Switzerland 
    * A model of the train system of Switzerland
    * A simple recommender system
    * Google maps for name -> geolocation
    * OpenStreetMap for the map

There are some heavy calculations behind each query, so it takes about 15 sec to load. Furthermore, you need to like at least 3 apartments and dislike at least 3, before the system starts recommending.

May I suggest a small textual amendment? "tell us where you commute to" might be a little clearer.

Edit: Also "Please enter your commute address..." in the input box. :)

Have you considered using overlays from route360 (https://developers.route360.net)? They are doing some really interesting stuff with multiple transit types (bicycle, car, mass transit, walking) as well as accounting for elevation changes and incorporating GTFS data where applicable.

Very cool, what technologies you are using in your backend?

For commute times are you using the SBB data during rush hour times? My commute is way longer if I don't go to work during rush hour as there are no 'Schnellzüge' outside of those times.

Thanks :-) The stack is based on:

* A Javascript based SPA with handlebars for template and leaflet.js for map

* Django + Postgres for the API

* Simple Vertex-Edge model of the train system, with shortest-path to estimate travel times (including walking distance)

-This is on our to-do list to improve, but we do this since querying all pairwise travel times from SBB/google would be too heavy.

* Numpy/Scipy for the machine learning

Awesome job! Would it be do-able to visualize the _frequency_ of public transport connections too?

For example it may take me only 20 minutes from Uster to the center of Zürich but if there is only 1 train an hour would be nice to know that.

I'm also curious about the commute time estimation. I've been playing with the app around the Geneva area where I live and work and I think the commute times are a bit too optimistic.

Nice idea, in any case!

Yeah, we are not accounting for connection times right now. However, we have the data to make it more accurate, just needs a bit more coding ;)

We take the times from cff / sbb site. We then add a walking time from and to bus / train stations. You can have a look to the graph here if you are interested : http://wonsch.ch/lab/2/

awesome stuff! another entry i really liked took a completely different approach https://kingdom.scapp.io/

also, the company that provides the data currently is currently looking for a Chief Product Officer

http://tamedia.prospective.ch/index_digital.cfm?sprCd=de#

noted ;)

> A model of the train system of Switzerland

I am curious, what do you use for this?

1:18 scale

Awesome, I didn't know about hackzurich. Perhaps I can come along next time?

Anyway, I put in my address in Zug and it stopped responding. Probably overloaded?

We have worked also in a similar application for a few American cities, like Seattle: https://my.teleport.org/cities/c23nb/Seattle/neighborhoods (also SF, NY and LA)

You might want to switch off DEBUG mode on your backend app...

    File "/home/django/django_project/wonsch/views.py" in get_data
      35.     homegate_result = requests.get('https://api-**CENSORED**.apicast.io:443/rs/real-estates',headers={'auth':'**CENSORED**'},params=homegate_params).json()

Thanks :-)

A bit off-topic: I lived in Munich for 20 years, now I live in Zurich and can't be any happier. Switzerland is a great place to work in IT. "HackZurich" is only one of the things that makes this city into what it is. Check out my post "Eight reasons why I moved to Switzerland" and shoot me a mail if you are interested in coming here. https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t...

Dear god, please make one of these for Washington, D.C.

http://www.trulia.com/for_rent/Washington,DC/map_v/driving:0...

You can filter by commute time to your work address under "All Filters"

http://www.padmapper.com/ also does this. But only for walk, bike, and drive. Just click on "more features" and "super-secret advanced features."

We might consider it, is there a good Real estate / Rent listing focussed on DC?

Not just for D.C., no. It's one of the larger/more expensive real estate markets in the U.S., but it's covered by "nationwide" listing tools.

I'm asking for this to be made half in jest, although D.C. traffic is atrocious, and this sort of data fusion looks fantastic. Your concept looks great. =)

Cool stuff. There's something similar for London too: http://property.mapumental.com/

https://www.stay22.com/ Similar too, but for Hotels and Airbnb in case you are travelling to visit someone else's workplace (searchable by their company name or address)

Seems like a great startup idea :) Hotel website usually have high affiliation rewards.

I started a company called locatable (www.locatable.com) with a couple of mates some years back. The search engine did the same thing in the UK. The site is now offline, but there's some screenshots here https://data.gov.uk/apps/locatable-0

By far the most time consuming aspect of running the algorithm was computing the polygons to plot on the gmap. The actual search is fairly straightforward, even when using roads instead of the relatively simple public transit graph to compute the isochrones.

Nice - I wanted something like that the other day. Hopefully with open government data we would some day be able to solve it.

I want to specify "I want to live close to a forest, a skatepark, and with an airport 1.5 hours from me", and then it should give me nearby areas that fit the criteria.

Data-collection, cleaning data, and tagging it up is hard though :(

Actually, the data cleaning isnt so bad. Open Street Map is what you want. I wrote a piece of software for locatable that parsed a given chunk of OSM (in this case, all of the UK mainland) and pull out stuff like hospitals, transit stations, land usage types and so on. I had two models: a zone and a poi. Zones were an area, eg a park or a forest or an industrial park that you could specify as an include/exclude + buffer distance. Eg: At least 10mi from a forest. Poi is point of interest and had the same search semantics: put me 1mi from a GP surgery or a supermarket. Or put me at least 1mi from a primary school because..er...mistakes were made...

Oh this was amazing, I used it a couple of times when I first moved to London to figure out where I needed to live. It helped out massively compared to the complete guesses I was going on.

Glad to help :)

I'd rather see recommendations on where to work given where I live.

I'd love to have similar things for super-markets (food/goods shops), for those without cars and buying lots of stuff. It might be more efficient to get onto a metro/subway and travel to a distant shop that is very close to the stop than to walk to a - physically - more proximate shop that requires you to walk and carry both ways.

On the other hand, walking for errands is great exercise. I find it strange that people make such an effort to go to the gym, but also make such an effort to avoid natural built-into-life exercise. Walking and any kind of motion is great, especially for those of us in a job that involves so much sitting!

There was a great poster campaign here in New York encouraging people to get off the subway one stop early, or take the stairs, showing the extra calories burned.

The issue is not walking, but potentially carrying a lot of groceries or other things back. A special sub-case, so to speak.

I do love walking in pretty much any other context.

Trulia does this in the U.S. for a number of cities. Here's New York: http://www.trulia.com/local/new-york-ny/driving:1|transit:0|...

I can't access the OP due to a firewall, is this similar to Zoopla's "time-travel" search?

http://www.zoopla.co.uk/travel-time/

I used something similar (http://www.triptropnyc.com/) when I was choosing where to move to in NYC for the first time.

Strange but we made website on same idea at HackZurich :)

we where overwhelmed by the quality and the number of apps you guys built ontop of the homegate.ch api. i really hope we can take this further.

We made it here too. Do you have a url to share?

Sorry we didn't upload it yet and visualized data in a heat map.

Can anyone comment how accurate the prices are? Because from what I see rents around the Geneva area are even more ridicolous than I remembered!

Geneva & Zurich are always going to be laughably expensive, mostly.

This is great, I've been considering writing something similar for London taking account cycling distance/time.

Ideally I'd also want also to have cycling+train - since that is also a feasible option for some people. E.g. I live 1km away from a train station that is well connected to my workplace, so I can bike to the train station and commute the rest.

Where did you get the homegate api? I was looking for it years ago to do something similar. :/

we opened it specifically for the hack zurich hackathon. but we're working on providing a public api in the future.

This is pretty amazing. Great job.

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