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Comment by hnnsj | Hacker News Reader

How is this more useful than an ordered list of search results, exactly? Once you've picked your destination, based on travel time, you still want figure out how to get there.

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Well it still maintains some geographic info by keeping the direction. This helps for instance in identifying clusters of places, so user can think: "If I go that way there a N other places nearby too". Also the cardinal directions are still preserved, which help to interface with user's preexisting geographic knowelege.

Well, to some degree, yes. Maybe it's even mostly true. But the fact that point A and B are close to point C by some mode of transportation does not guarantee that they are close to each other. They might be separated by some geographic feature like a river, mountain or large road that doesn't separate them from C. Or the transportation options between A and C and between B and C may be excellent, but horrible between A and B. And so on. You need a normal map, or very good prior knowledge of the geography indeed, to know that.

It lets you quickly see which search results you're walking toward and want to check the details on. You could get the same info from reading a result list, but if this takes less attention it's a good presentation.

It's computing the real travel distance so false clustering will mostly happen for longer trips where the obstruction is close to the origin.

If you click on A, you will be able to see if it is close to B or not. Or, more generally, clicking on a few points in a cluster on this map should give you an idea of whether you'll be able to travel easily between places once you get there. So I don't think it's as useless as you are making it out to be.

The system could also split the clusters based on proximity. A simple line between groups of nearby features.

Then again, I fail to see how this is a major improvement over just clicking the first location of interest in an ordered list to generate a new list etc.

My main point is that to me, you're either interested in going to the closest location from where you are, and you'd probably want a brief description of each location to filter out points of interest to you. A list is just as good if not better (since you can quickly glance more information about each place) for that purpose.

Or else you're interested in the geography of the different locations or their exact spatial relationship and then you need a normal map anyway.

Sure, this is a neat geographic data visualization, but I just can't see myself using it in a real world situation.

Honestly I think a standard map with the times for destinations of interest shown in a little caption next to each point would be more useful. That preserves the geographic location information visually.

If you were interested in trip chaining, you could still pick the direction you wanted to head.

The map doesn't guarantee that at all. Two items on the map can appear next to each other and take a very long time to get between -- perhaps they're separated by a freeway that you can't cross, for example.

I feel that should be accounted for in the time it takes to reach that location, and therefore its place on the map.

Imagine a long river with a bridge at the point you are currently located, but no other bridges. Two places across from the river from each other might each be an hour away, but two hours apart from each other because you have to come back to your current location to cross the river. They'd look nearby on this map because they're in close places and similar times to get to.

This is actually an extremely common case with public transportation:

There are two channels of buses going N-S in the city, and both channels meet downtown. From downtown, two locations can be about equally distant in travel time northwards, and nearby in E-W distance compared to their N-S displacement, but they're separated by a freeway and lie on different N-S channels, and so the E-W distance takes as long to commute (by foot or transit) as going downtown and back northwards would.

That's an interesting and commonly occurring case for this kind of map. I wonder if the visualization would be improved by introducing visual connections between points that are nearby, and/or painting barriers between points that are close in the map but far away in reality.

Two locations that are close to a third location need not be close to each other. A and B might be separated by some barrier which does not separate them from C. Maybe a bit of an edge case, but still, not that uncommon.

That is true, though in practice it would mostly be true that destinations sharing similar travel times and similar directional vectors would typically be close to each other. If you didn't already have some general knowledge of the area, you'd probably notice the complication of a freeway when you "zoomed in" to the standard map view.

Well, it's easier to see the distribution of distances. Knowing something is the 3rd closest is less useful that knowing it is actually 30 minutes away.

More so, it is common to want to go to more than one place in an outing. Most of the time when I am searching for the "nearest" X, I'm really searching for the X that is least out of the way between points A and B. This map doesn't help answer that question while an isochrone, or heatmap, or even standard map does.

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