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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

I like the idea - but it isn't working well for my location, at the base of a canyon in Utah, with mountains on 3 sides of me and a big lake on the 4th. It looks like it knows that there are canyons and roads and obstacles that need to be accounted for, but the spikes jutting out from my location don't follow the roads or terrain.

FWIW, the site at: https://maps.openrouteservice.org/reach also fails to compute accurately from my location for an hour, but does work accurately for 50 minutes or less. If nothing else, maybe I'm a good test case?

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Along the same lines, it doesn't seem to account for ferry routes when there is a lot of water in your area.

https://oalley.net/map/b4y

Sharing only so the developer has another test case :)

The three points on the right are only reachable by ferry, so add approximately 1.5 hrs to the travel time. Plus the one at the bottom right would require the driver to pass through the downtown core of the city of Vancouver; even without the ferry time, it wouldn't be possible to do that in under 1 hour from the origin.

It actually does seem to account for ferry routes. I plugged a location in Seattle in and the surface it draws juts across the water to roughly where the ferries dock. Maybe there just isn't a data source for where you're at yet?

The more I am seeing examples, and looking at the terrain, it seems like the problem is that it is only acting on the endpoints, and assuming that the map should simply extend from starting point to ending point, regardless of what is between them. But in the truth, it is quite possible to have an endpoint that cannot be accessed in a straight line because you must circle around a mountain, etc. These maps would need to account for those scenarios.

Yeah, I've seen some strange results as well, such as a large chunk of accessible area jutting through Olympia to Lacey from my starting point in West Seattle where the intervening land is not touched. I don't see how I could get there in 1 hour because the highways all go around the military bases and backwoods there.

https://oalley.net/map/b7p

There's a similar blob going from Seattle to Preston, which appears to contain some impossible routes where you would get off I-90 and then circle around via highway.

As long as you stay out of the mountains and don't cross any water it seems pretty accurate as a first approximation.

Same, I live on an island it it showed multiple routes crossing the strait where no ferry or bridge exists.

Edit: but it did work if I lowered the time. Interesting work though.

Ya I noticed that looking for 1 hour routes from a city next to Vancouver. It got a bunch right but it said I could get out to Powell River in an hour. It's like a 30 minute drive to the ferry, a 45 minute ferry ride an hour drive down the sunshine coast highway then another ferry to Powell river. Everything else around the lower mainland seemed fairly accurate. Though it depends heavily on which direction you're going, at which time of day. Some of those places would take hours to drive to depending on how bad traffic is.

Seems you are a good test case. Could you share your map with the "share this map" button ? So I can figure it out

Sure, it is shared at: https://oalley.net/map/b4e

If it helps, the 3 points going east are probably due to 2 canyons that do go east of town, one of which splits into 2 roads after a mile or so. And many of the others are similar in that, yes, there is a road that would extend your reach in those directions... but not quite where the map is drawing it. There are two areas that are complete anomalies: the path going NE through Springville and the one going SSW towards Levan have zero correlation with any reasonable roads - those both are flying straight over mountain ranges.

Thank you, I will study it.

Another wrong map. https://oalley.net/map/b4u

In 8h you can get to Salamanca(East of Barcelona) according to Google Maps, so like half of Spain should be marked.

It's also interesting that according to this, you can get to Monaco(6h 34m on Gmaps) , but no to Marseille (4h 54m on GMaps).

Same here, the points look mostly correct for going around mountains, but it doesn't follow the road to get there https://oalley.net/map/b59

https://oalley.net/map/b6j is another pretty poor one. edinburgh to Anstruther is probably closer to 2 hours. North Berwick is more than achieveable in an hour. Callander (in the north west of the map) is closer to 90m.

Another interesting case is going from Key West out. Naples, FL is shown inside the 3 hour range, 110 miles apart as the crow flies. I'm not sure whether it's finding a ferry route, or whether ferries reasonably go that speed, but I thought the results were interesting.

https://oalley.net/map/b8y

Here's one:

4 hours by car from San Francisco. It says you can't reach South Lake Tahoe, but Google Maps (and my experience) show that it's usually about 3 1/2 hours.

https://oalley.net/map/bd7

It also seems to be missing (or hugely over-estimating the travel time over) some bridges in the San Francisco Bay Area. oalley.net/map/b8h, for instance, has a ton of weird sectors.

That's funny, I tried the same thing from the the base of Little Cottonwood and had the same issue.

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