Travel Time Explorer
Drop a pin and shade everywhere you can reach in 20 minutes.
AdvancedWeb appData viz14–28hAI-buildable 2/5needs OpenRouteService (key)worth shipping
Show reachability rather than distance: pick a point and a travel time, and shade the area you could actually get to. It's a far more useful way to think about where to live or meet, and rendering the resulting polygon well is a proper geometry problem.
UI
Logic
Useful
Hosting · Free tier, metered
Deploys free on Vercel Hobby, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages + Workers.
Needs one small function to keep the API key off the client. Free tiers are metered by invocation, not time.
Deploy it and share a link.
Core features · 7
- Click the map to set an origin point
- A travel time and mode of transport are selectable
- The reachable area renders as a shaded polygon
- Several time bands render as nested contours
- A legend explains the bands
- Loading state covers the calculation, which is not instant
- The origin can be dragged to recalculate
The interesting part
- Rendering complex polygons with holes correctly
- Debouncing recalculation while the origin is being dragged
- Communicating that the boundary is an approximation
Once it works
- Compare reachability from two origins and show the overlap
- Add points of interest within the reachable area
- Add departure-time awareness for transit
Suggested stack
reacttypescripttailwindleaflet
External APIs
- OpenRouteService · needs a key