Open standards illuminate different ways of understanding the world. After moving east, I was impressed with how quickly I could get to other major cities in the tri-state area and the breadth of places that people commuted into NYC from. I was also unimpressed with how often my bike was the fastest way to get to other places in Brooklyn. Particularly when apartment hunting, there seemed to be pockets of higher transit accessibility in certain areas that sometimes corresponded to higher rent prices. I needed a map and the past weeks' snow storm was an opportunity to make one.

I pulled some GTFS data and pre-computed transit travel times with Open Trip Planner for every intersection in NYC and some urban hubs in the tri-state area. The transit data includes MTA, CT Transit, Septa, and NJ Transit. The polygons are stored with PostGIS, and leaflet makes quick work of rendering them as GeoJSON layers. I have a few mapping projects on the same stack written in clojure/script so it was a natural extension.

Happy to answer any questions.

Note: Most transit agencies willingly provide their own GTFS data, but Amtrak's had to be FOIA'd so I used a third party cleaned up version of it.