Gorgeous Travel Planner Shows Times, Rather Than...

Gorgeous Travel Planner Shows Times, Rather Than Distances

We need something like this implemented in every city!

“Kill your maps. They’re useless. What you need, says Vincent Meertens, a recent graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, are time maps. ‘Everybody thinks in time rather than distance,’ he tells Co.Design in an email. ‘That is what TimeMaps is about: putting time in a map and letting go of the distance.’

It might sound counterintuitive at first—a map that’s unconcerned with actual geography?—but think about the last time you had to get somewhere quickly in a foreign country or even your own city. Here in New York, my apartment is 20 miles away from JFK airport. Which must mean it takes about 20 minutes to get there, right? Wrong. On the subway during the day without delays, it might take an hour. At night with delays, it might take as long as 2 1/2 hours. That’s the only information I need and care about.

And that’s what TimeMaps would reveal. A web app, it plots a region—in this case, the Netherlands—according to train travel times. Load TimeMaps from anywhere in the country, and it automatically checks your location, shows the nearest train station, and charts trip times around the country in rings, with each colored ring representing another 30 minutes.

Most importantly, the map is live. It grows and shrinks throughout the day, as travel times themselves grow and shrink; the bigger the map, the longer it’ll take you to get around. Note in the video above that the map expands at night, when trains run infrequently or not at all, then contracts during the day, when trains run on their regular, zippy schedule. Track delays? The map grows again.

At the moment, TimeMaps only details train trips. In the future, Meertens hopes to incorporate cars, bikes, and other forms of transportation. He also plans to develop an iOS and Android version of the app (currently, it’s only available online). “This version will have all the functions of current trip planners like HopStop,” he says.

Gorgeous Travel Planner Shows Times, Rather Than Distances

We need something like this implemented in every city!