Transit, real estate mash-up helps you live near transit

Say you’re moving to the area, have a job, and want to find places with good transit to work. How do you figure it out? A lot of people just look at the Metro map and don’t consider other modes, but a new service called AutNo is trying to help people locate near transit.

This is actually a problem I hear often. A family friend moved to DC a couple of years ago, for a job at PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Tysons. The Silver Line was still a few years off, but he wanted to live in a vibrant, urban neighborhood. Where should he go?

The bus maps are daunting to decipher. It took me a couple of hours to really puzzle through the combinations and cross-reference it with my general knowledge of housing prices in various neighborhoods.

Boston-based AutNo tries to help by putting rental listings and trip planning together in one interface. You can view available rentals (it doesn’t have places for sale, yet), click on one, and see transit directions to your office or another location you specify.

The about page reads:

AutNo is the first apartment search designed and developed specifically for people without cars. For the first time since the automobile was invented, the percentage of Americans who drive to school or work is on the decline. Gas prices are skyrocketing and automobile carbon emissions are contributing to global warming. Commuting and living without an automobile is the way of the future for many people. AutNo is dedicated to helping these people find apartments.

It will also show driving routes to work, too, if you want them.

You can narrow down results by price and number of bedrooms. A future feature that would be helpful is to also let people restrict the searches by travel time. That way, you could say that you want a place under $2,000 a month that’s no more than a 45 minute trip to work, or whatever.

Basically, combine this with Mapnificent:

And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record: this is why open data is valuable. A transit agency might build a great app, but they’re never going to build a mash-up of real estate data and transit data. When it’s easy to put transit routing into an app, you not only can build apps that give people transit routing, but tools and apps that combine transit routing with almost anything else.

Update: I hadn’t know it, but WalkScore actually has this exact Mapnificent-style feature. You can filter apartment listings by transit distance to a point:

However, when you click on an apartment, WalkScore does not show you the transit routing with trains and buses you would take, while AutNo does. Without that information, people won’t as easily learn which buses might work best for them or be able to judge whether a location is really likely as acessible from transit as the system says.

It would be best to have both at once on the same site; as it is now, I’d recommend that people use a combination of both tools for their search.