meetinglocationcalculator.com
Personally, I am more than happy to take an overnight train than a short-flight, given the additional overhead of travelling to/from the airport. An overnight train can take you pretty far within continental Europe.
I'd be taking a train to London (about 3h), then EuroStar to Paris (2h 15), then to Berlin (about 8h). Total time ~13 hours.
Flight time for me to Berlin is ~4h, but to get to Airport and the wait for boarding brings it probably close to 8h, but then I can't visit the relatives in Paris that easy.
Actually I don't like flying that much these days (the eco reasons aside).
Some EU countries (Greece, Poland, Portugal) still have terrible, slow trains. Paris-Berlin takes 8h (fastest one) for about 877 km. Berlin-Gdansk takes 8h for about 400 km (!!).
I last traveled by night train about 20 years ago throughout Germany and Poland. It was terrible experience. But great if I was looking for a companion to beer, or surprise sex with random folk.
Also night trains are non-existent in some countries. For example in the UK, most trains run from 6am onwards on week days. Forget if you need to travel from York and be in London for 8am. We have some night services[0] that go out of London to Scotland/Cornwall but I see them more like touristic offer than for any economic reason.
[0] https://www.nationalrail.co.uk/on-the-train/sleeper-trains/
Some of my friends have greatly praised European trains, so I thought they'd be far more compelling.
It turns out several people on HN had similar ideas (Villagers app was one but it seems to be offline now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33344734). I stopped working on it after reading this HN thread where several people linked to various articles like https://blog.garrytan.com/travel-planning-software-the-most-....
I'm not sure if the tool specifically accounts for that or if the math just ends up working out, but I was testing with various combinations of my family and it always ended up at someone's home airport.
In planar Euclidean geometry, for any three points, if the triangle formed by those three points has all its angles less than 120 degrees, then the sum of the distances from the three points to certain points inside the triangle will be smaller than the sum of the shortest two sides. Only if one of the angles exceeds 120 degrees will one of the three points always have the shortest total travel distance.
The relevant concept is the 'Fermat point', which is the point that minimizes total distance from the vertices of a triangle.
In spherical geometry, it gets more complicated, but the same logic applies to spherical triangles that aren't too large. You can definitely find sets of three points on a sphere, such that points inside the triangle are the one which minimizes travel distance.
But you should still be able to define a metric over the graph of airports which is based on costs.
And what Fermat points tell us is that even in well behaved metric spaces like the plane there can be cases where minimizing distance means going to a node other than one of the starting point. So in more complex spaces it seems likely that that remains the case.
Which was all the op was asking.
This all also assumes that you will always be able to fly directly to your destination on the selected day. If you end up diverting or getting delayed, or if certain routes make that _more_ likely, then this wouldn't be a win at all.
Not sure. But if you put the two locations of Caracas, VE and San Francisco, US, they suggest meeting in Houston, US.
Does it make sense? Is it more environmental friendly for two people to meet in the middle rather than having one person staying and the other going there? My gut says the latter should be more environmental friendly.
(Disclaimer, I have no idea if there are direct flights from Caracas to SF, but from Brazil I always need to stop by in a hub)
However, I did try putting in e.g. 10 x Boston, 1 x London, 1 x Paris, and it did in fact suggest Boston as the meeting point.
Realistically, it is often also the case that the announced location of a meeting influences who attends it, as compared to travelling for a conference (flights + lodging + meals), the costs are much, much lower for people who already live in that city, who need to only buy the entry ticket.
So if you announce a conference in Paris instead of Boston you might expect a bunch of people who already live in Paris to suddenly want to attend. This effect is hard to account for.
Fun and well-designed tool, though.
In my case, I used Shanghai, San Francisco, and Zurich. The suggested location was Fairbanks, AK, which for the Zurich & Shanghai based team members would mean a 24 hour, two stop flight. I think we'll pass.
Adding London to the equation shifts the meeting point to… Tromsø, Norway, which demonstrates the absurdity of the geographical micro-optimization perfectly. Picking Stockholm or Oslo in the same neighborhood would have saved literally every participant a stop on their itinerary.
Would be a fun CS101, or CS201 assignment...
It’s in the “Show HN” -> Tips link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638
Of course, this and many other submissions just seem to have resubmitted until getting traction. I don’t know what to say about that
[ed: on mobile so can't launch the app]
You know, smartphones are capable of displaying websites in desktop mode. Why do you block mobile users' experience like this? I don't have my laptop with me, and won't until Monday. Not being able to take a look at your app in the meantime means I probably never will.
Am I missing something?
HR: "our company meetup allows authentic inclusive in-person interactions, all while helping save the environment, by only releasing 1M tons of CO2 rather than 1.03M tons."
The most environmentally friendly meeting is obviously one that happens online. In-person meetups increase retention but -- until teleportation is invented -- that retention comes at an environmental cost.
A similar tool could be designed to minimize something else (cost, flight time, etc.) which would have a better use case outside corporate ESG politics.
And of course, if you don’t know who’s attending…
While not everyone can manage this due to upfront costs, a lot more people could do this, but simply don’t.
if your team meets those critera then this is the only way to make these decisions.
even if your team doesn't entirely agree on b, those of us who do can use this to inform our votes on where to meet.
The more people or travel groups you add to the equation the less likely it is in my mind that you actually needed to physically meet unless you're meeting to do something in the real world which usually can't be done absolutely anywhere. If you're not meeting somewhere specific to do a thing in that place why couldn't the meeting have been done virtually?
Someone else suggested conferences, and I guess that could make sense in the case of small conferences where any random major airport hotel can handle their needs and a substantial portion of the attendees can be expected to vote, but it doesn't scale.
In this day and age, particularly in the wake of covid lockdowns, meetings in the flesh are a waste of time and money, let alone the resources; and I say that as someone who doesn't subscribe to environmentalism. You need to talk to someone? Radio and telephones solved that a century ago. You need to see someone face to face? Video conferencing solved that a decade or two ago.
The only exception is if you must physically exchange something with the other person(s). Otherwise, whatever excuse you have to meet up with someone is vapid; save the time, money, and resources and just fire up Zoom.
I'm not sold on the math because it doesn't seem to take into account connecting flights. At least, it does not seem clear that me in SFO and my colleague in KEF should meet in Yellowknife, NT, Canada. It's an airport neither of us could reach directly on commercial flights. Considering they would need to fly the wrong way to FRA first, it seems like MSP or YUL make way more sense.
For example, for me it chose Toronto for an international meeting even tho one of the folks attending was from New York City. Why not NYC to prevent one person from traveling.
Also, you need weighting, as often there are multiple people from a location.
as a UI bug, when I typed "ewr" or even "newark" it shows zero search results. strangely if i back off just one character on either then it does show newark liberty international airport. for some reason the search is penalizing you for finishing the string.
a second one, the show report button didnt work at all.
product suggestion: make the results a unique url that can be shared amongst coworkers planning an event. they should be able to edit it like a google doc to collaboratively update how many people are flying from what locations, and then everyone can reference the shared url to see the calculated result.
last thing, can you share some of the tech details behind how you made the globe/flight-visualizations?
The biggest ones I have found is that when there are multiple people flying from the same airport, it won't redo the math to try to find a better location.
Also it is more fuel efficient for just one to fly than two when there are only two people.
Yeah, I saw this too. I started by choosing three locations in Russia, which put the meeting point somewhere in the middle of Russia. Then I added 10-15 departures in Europe. Realistically, the meeting point should be somewhere in Europe/Eastern Europe at that point, as there is only three departures from Russia. But the meeting point remained in middle/center Russia.
A one off meeting isn't going to move the needle as compared to that.
I guess this makes sense, but it's interesting to see visualized.