She had simply taken a large fold-out map of England, worked out the average distance she could cover in one hour at rush hour, and drawn a circle of that radius centered on her workplace. It's a straightforward method, if a little crude.
But then she remembered that I worked for a traffic information company, and asked if I knew a better way.
I did. We're currently developing a tool which displays how far you can get from a certain starting point in a given time, factoring in the wealth of road and traffic information we amass.
Here's a shot.
Bigger version, click here.
When we've perfected this it'll be one piece of software with a lot of interesting uses:
- You're considering which schools you can drive to in 20 minutes at 8:30am.
- You're looking for new jobs and you want to see which employers are within half an hour's commute.
- You want to see which country pubs you can get to quickly.
We're only in alpha stages at the moment. It takes the traffic computers a lot of time to do all the calculations, so releasing this to our members isn't an option yet. When it's in beta we'll let you know.
Keep your eyes peeled.
Chris
3 comments:
Sound good! - Looking forward to it!
I like the look of that map, and usefully I live in altrincham so I have save it for my next job hunt !!
Would it be possible to overlay train/Metrolink/bus timetable info so you could also see how far you could get via public transport vs car.
beaker141
Keep up the good work !
Interesting stuff. It is possible to do this with pro software like Mapinfo with Drivetime but this is not available for the majority.
Are you aware of the test maps created by mysociety that compare car and public transport, amongst other things? http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/
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