Find apartments by commute times

It's cool to see that there is now a general-purpose tool like the one that I made last year. I'll definitely use it next time I move. A couple things about this tool weren't obvious to me on my first experience:

1) I didn't know what a "walk score" was. I looked briefly for an explanation on the site, but didn't find one. At first I thought higher was worse, as if it were a measure of how far you had to walk to get to work. But by playing around on the site for a bit, it seems like higher is better, and it seems to be a measure of how accessible shops and necessities are by walking out your front door (that alone is really cool). My apartment scores a 92.

2) One implication of not understanding the "walk score" was that I thought the walk score filter was to limit the search results by how long your commute was. When I input my work address, my apartment wasn't within the search radius, so I actually wanted to expand the search radius. (Walking 2 miles to work everyday is a nice way to get some exercise, but my commute is only 10 minutes if I decide to bike.) It took me a minute to notice the "time" filter at the top of the page.

3) Lastly, I didn't see how to filter by whether a place allows dogs or cats, but then I found that you can expand the filter box to filter by pets, price, and bedrooms. Perfect.

Now that I've figured out those three issues, the site is easy to use and I look forward to using it next time I move. It makes the tool that I hacked together for this purpose obsolete.

[1] https://github.com/dcuddeback/apartment-scrape

Have used it to find my last ~7 apartments/houses.

That is all.

EDIT: I'm looking to move across the bay, and this has brought some areas of Oakland to my attention that I had previously neglected. Too, it's a cool hack. So -- useful, and "I wish I'd thought of it". Killer combo.

I once read a lesswrong.com article on how commute times are one of the most underrated aspects in picking a place to live.

Of course, this also means you will have some teaching to do.

However, the car commute times from a certain address seem computed oddly.

Picking, for example, 199 Elm Street, New Canaan, CT, shows 10 minute drives from what it considers main roads (because they have route numbers?) while not revealing the parallel side roads which actually have much lower times thanks to no traffic lights or stop signs. I've checked a number of areas on both coasts, and the same seems to be true: car commute times are based on main routes, not low traffic alternate routes. (The mountain roads NW of LA instead of the interstate are another example.)

That said, this is fantastic, and since the map is shown, you can probably eyeball the alternate routes to find a perfect low hassle drive.

Will be recommending this to my realtor friends working in highly walkable areas to help show the benefits.

EDIT: It finds apartments in New York; maybe it just doesn't work in Canada. Which is odd, given Craigslist works fine in Canada and it figures out commute times in Canada.

It seems to correctly pick up pockets in San Francisco where you can take BART from and not show you things closer to your destination, but out of reach of mass transit options.

Relevant: http://youtu.be/zJOS0sV2a24?t=4m

Now, if only there was a way to enter 2 addresses (for spouses/roommates) and have it give you the places with the best cumulative commute times. EDIT: Just saw Mapnificent does this!

Would also love to see this fully integrated into http://padmapper.com.

This is a fantastic idea, I just wonder how sustainable it is.

When I switched to any of the other options it showed me Boston places.

We did find something in the end, but it was a really manual process.

Rebranding it and doing an new-office-locator might work as well. :)

I had a bug to report: When I move the slider on the 'number of bedrooms' and make it '1', I cannot change it (to '2', say). I am using chrome 14.0.835.186.

It's a great MVP, Would love to see more break down options (such as pets)