Isochrone: a line on a map or diagram connecting places from which it takes the same time to travel to a certain point.
- Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can’t afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay. Slide the sliders on the following map and all will come clear.
I've been toying with the idea of generating these, but on a much smaller scale - showing proximity to local amenities (pubs, shops, banks), the idea being that you can find houses in convenient locations. I looked at the source for this site - very well commented.
This is the sort of new idea that could and really should take off more so than it already even has. Airports, lobbies of hotels, bus depots, train stations ... businesses that cater to people who have just arrived in an unfamiliar place and need some info on travel to meetings, etc.
The bitch of it is it's computationally intensive; there are a few places online where you can generate them yourself using Google's API but the two approaches are: 1) Set up your map, break it into grids, and calculate travel time for every pixel in that grid. A 100-pixel grid around my house for five miles took 10 minutes to generate (a 3000 pixel grid covering central asia took 20... says something about roads out there, or about Google's data) 2) Set up your start point and drunkard's walk your way down every road you see, stopping when you hit your predefined limit. Of the two sites I found that do this, neither of them complete - I suspect Google has set up a "quit hammering our servers for calls this way" filter. I found a couple services that have software that allows you to do it. One of them wants 800 euro a year for a license. The other wants 500 for a coords-in, coords-out no GUI codebase. Fun to play with, though. Too bad I don't have a spare Beowulf cluster sitting around.