Spacetime maps: A map that warps to show travel time | Hacker News Reader

Spacetime maps: A map that warps to show travel time

maps.vvolhejn.com

165 pointskevinsundar28 comments

It's a shame that they're warping an image, rather than warping map data. Having distorted labels is very distracting and makes it hard to get a sense of whether this could possibly be useful.

Recreating map data is quite time-consuming. I did so though, to make a train map of Taiwan with time-proportional distances between each point. (based on a local train rather than an express train).

https://peterburk.github.io/tra/

If you're interested in a simple Logo programming project for kids, it was a fun, visually pleasing project. If only the public transport companies realised the value in having time-proportional maps.

Author’s video about building this map is pretty interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC2VQ-oyDG0

Like the idea - lived in LA my whole life and it wasn’t until the start of covid, when I was able to commute across huge swaths of the city in the order of dozens of minutes rather than hours, did I realize how distorted my view of its physical size was - in places like LA, when asked how far something is, an angelino will almost always respond in a measurement of time rather than distance.

haha, I had the same realization after I moved from San Diego. Nobody in Albuquerque wanted to hear "20 minutes" when asking "How far is X?"

Somehow in San Diego everything is 25 minutes from everything else

In the New York City area time is the measure of distance. I think that's the same in every large Metro area.

In LA, you can go during non rush hour on what should be a 5 minute skip across an “easy” onramp/offramp, and get stuck in 2 hour traffic jam (probably an accident but who knows could just be all 3 major sports having massive games at the exact same time and you’re not a sports fan so you didnt expect carmageddon) to go 3 miles, and make it the same way back in five minutes. There is no such linear relationship. It’s kind of like predicting the weather, depending on what part you live in.

Hilariously, LA doesn't look that distorted because it's uniformly molasses.

I'm not sure I properly understand what these maps are visualizing. I'd have expected the London public-transport map to heavily compress adjacent tube stations and expand tube "dead-zones" but this doesn't appear to be the case. It can take me 10 minutes to get to central but 60 mins to get somewhere equidistant in z2 or z3.

NYC seems like bad default example. I had to check other cities to "get" what's this site about. With NYC - everywhere is similarly far.

I was impressed by how efficient both metro and car metrics are.

TBH kind of disappointed by how little it distorts, especially for cities with stereotypically difficult travel times by car like LA. almost loos like random distortions as opposed to something to pattern match. Really the only thing noticeable is bodies of water distort the map the most (which explains why LA doesn't get that distorted).

Would be kind of nice for when i click the point that all the points distort based on that point instead of globally trying to position each point relative to every other point.

And the fact that the distortion is preset and not based on where you click. This is one of those things using heat maps where the clustering is clearly large population centers. Not really as helpful/useful as people think they are

Why would where you click matter? Two points are always the same time apart from each other regardless of reference to any third point.

because warping of spacetime is relative

If the analogy to warped spacetime was exact, then there would be a “scale factor” for every point depending on the local transit speed. Then it would be possible to do as this page does and for the answer not to depend on starting point.

However in the real city the transit speed at any point is not isotropic, the space is 3-D, and some paths are forbidden (getting on-off the train between stops).

if you want to use spacetime in the title...

Toggle on "Focus on hover".

Does anybody have any recommendations on self-hosted ways to create isochrone maps? I've been looking at OpenRouteService, Valhalla, and OpenTripPlanner, but I'm finding it difficult to compare them. Don't seem to be many "experience reports" online.

- https://github.com/GIScience/openrouteservice

- https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla

- https://github.com/opentripplanner/OpenTripPlanner

Reminded me of MIT's game "A Slower Speed of Light"

https://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/

I don't exactly understand how it works. E.g. in NYC, Bushwick to Flatbush is notoriously slow (meandering buses only), while Flatbush to Chinatown is quite fast (direct trains over the Manhattan bridge). Despite that, no matter where I click, I only see same twitching map, not a map twitching in a way that would reflect the travel time from the point I click.

(I ignore the idea of traveling by car in thickly populated areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn; it only makes sense if you value your personal space way more than you value both your money and time, and don't have to park.)

I too was confuse initially. The map doesn't care where you click. Clicking just toggles to the time based map. In that map, physical distance between any two points represents the time to get between those two points.

Whether it accurately does that, as in your Bushwick Flatbush example, I don't know.

If you turn on "Focus on hover" in the settings, then it matters where you tap (on mobile).

Indeed, this helps, thanks! Also there's a switch between car and public transport.

The thing remains weird nevertheless. I'd assume that if you click a point at this mode, the point stays put, because the time from this point to this point remains zero and does not change. But the map twitches so that the point under cursor / tap moves away. I suspect that the map shows some other kind of approximation, not the time to the point clicked. Likely the grid that defines effective times is somehow sparse, and approximating the distortion well when a click hits rather away from a node is hard. But that would still be weird, because I suppose that points like airports and train terminals should definitely be major nodes of that grid.

I really appreciate this and hope to see more time infused maps. As we get ready for the arrival of lunar time, these tools move the needle in the right direction.

Previous discussion on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39808215

If you're on mobile, click the hamburger menu and enable "Focus on hover"

What an absolutely fascinating concept

Reply on news.ycombinator.com