How Close is Everything You Need?
One of the biggest challenges when moving home is deciding which compromise you are prepared to make. You might want to live close to work, a good school, a supermarket, a park, a gym and your favourite coffee shop - but finding somewhere that sits within easy reach of everything is rarely possible.
Close is an interactive travel-time map of the United States designed to solve exactly that problem. Instead of measuring access to just one destination, it allows you to select up to six different amenities and then colours every census block according to the travel time to the furthest of those destinations.
Using Close is refreshingly straightforward:
- Search for a city or neighbourhood
- Add the destinations that matter to you
- Choose how you would travel to each one - walking, cycling or public transport
The map then instantly calculates how close you are to your selected destinations, shading every block by its worst-case travel time. Click on any block and you can see the individual journey times to each selected destination, making it easy to compare different neighbourhoods.
This 'weakest link' approach sets Close apart from many travel-time maps. Rather than asking How close is this area to a supermarket? it asks How long will it take me to reach everything that I care about? If one destination is significantly further away than the others, that becomes the defining measure of the neighbourhood's convenience. It is an elegant way to visualise the trade-offs that people make every day when choosing where to live.
Via: Quantum of Sallazzo
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