Show HN: How many people live within an hour walk of you?

Show HN: How many people live within an hour walk of you?(blockatlas.com)

9 points by NameError 40 days ago | 6 comments

I've been building a bunch of US geography tools/games/visualizations and thought folks on HN might like this one. There are also drive-time and bike-time tools available on the same page.

For folks interested, all of the data comes from OpenStreetMap and the US Census at the moment - OSM for routing and points interest and the US Census for population data.

Anonymous users can use it 5x/day. I put up a waitlist page to gauge interest in a paid version but there's no way for the public to make an account - feel free to bypass the limits in an incognito tab.

The site is US-only for the time being - sorry for international folks!

jensabacik 40 days ago |

Very cool idea. You don't plan to add data for Europe any time soon?

NameError 40 days ago | |

I'd like to! It'd be pretty straightforward for the parts based on OpenStreetMap i.e. generating travel time areas / points of interest, I'd just need a bigger database. Ingesting global population & demographic data would be a bit of a bigger project since the site is built around US Census territory boundaries at the moment.

It'd definitely something I want to add, but since I'm quite limited in the time I spend on the project, I think it makes sense to keep it US-only for now. Thanks for trying it out!

minpym 40 days ago |

interesting. i thin it also can be useful for location scouting, like opening a retail store.

huseyinl 40 days ago |

I didnt get how can this information be useful

NameError 40 days ago | |

I think the fun/hobbyist/urbanist answer is that people just like to know facts about where they live, I've spent hours now looking up different places' data. The more commercial answer if I were pitching this as a product is that 'who lives within X minutes of this point' is a big question in CRE site selection etc if e.g. you're deciding where to expand a franchise. The walk-time version is more of a fun demo of the engine than anything else.

Thanks for the feedback! The site (and I suppose this post) doesn't really do much to answer "what's the point?"

janrakete 40 days ago | | |

I know people who work in urban planning, and they find this also generally interesting because the data and its visualization can be used to identify areas where action is needed in terms of local transit planning.