Hi HN! Today I'm launching OpenTimes, a free database of roughly 150 billion pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between United States Census geographies. In addition to letting you visualize travel isochrones on the homepage, OpenTimes also lets you download massive amounts of travel time data for free and with no limits.
The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists, etc.) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying Google or Esri for the necessary data. By pre-calculating times between commonly-used research geographies (i.e. Census) and then making those times easily accessible via SQL, I hope to make large-scale accessibility research cheaper and simpler.
Some technical bits that may be of interest to HN folks:
- The entire OpenTimes backend is just static Parquet files on R2. There's no RDBMS or running service. The whole thing costs about $10/month to host and is free to serve.
- All travel times were calculated by pre-building the inputs (OSM, OSRM networks) and then distributing the compute over hundreds of GitHub Actions jobs.
- The query/SQL layer uses a setup I haven't seen before: a single DuckDB database file with views that point to static Parquet files via HTTP.
Finally, the driving times are optimistic since they don't (yet) account for traffic. This is something I hope to work on in the near future. Enjoy!
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