Travel-time maps show how time and distance relate

by David Alpert   •   November 22, 2011 1:08 pm

Several fascinating Web tools have started to turn around the traditional map, using distance on the map to show places that take longer to reach, in a style known as "travel time maps." A site called TIMEMAPS does this with the Netherlands:

TIMEMAPS lets you distort a map of the country based on how long it takes to reach any point from a starting location. It also animates how that map changes over the course of the day.

The animation begins at 1:23. Note how regions not accessible in the middle of the night become accessible as the animation gets toward the morning. Meanwhile, the map steadily shrinks, as transit options become more frequent into the daytime.

If someone did the same for a US city, it might be interesting to do the same for driving times, and see how space actually grows during rush periods, as more people traveling and more congestion makes places effectively farther away.

A similar site we've discussed before, the Travel Time Tube Map, similarly distorts the iconic London Underground diagram to reflect the actual time to reach each station from a chosen starting point.

David Alpert is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Greater Greater Washington and Greater Greater Education. He worked as a Product Manager for Google for six years and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He loves the area which is, in many ways, greater than those others, and wants to see it become even greater.