That's a nice idea re using an existing place as a starting point. I think some users won't have a clear idea as to exactly what they want so making it easier to "browse" could be helpful.
For the most part extending to the whole country shouldn't be too difficult (famous last words!) -- most of the data sources I'm currently using aren't specific to London. But I think I'll probably first go deep rather than wide, allowing the user to look at areas at a more granular level should they wish to.
Not the OP, but I've actually made something like that to help people figure out where to live in London based on the criteria they care about -- here it is https://findmyarea.co.uk/?search_type=areas
Would be great to see similar tools for other cities!
It is a tool I have often thought would be useful. It's tricky to get the questions right but this is pretty good. I think extending it to the rest of the country will add a lot of complexity- like how far away is the nearest station, can I even get home deliveries etc.
It would also be handy to name a place (maybe where you live) and see what filters would get you there, and then fine tune the filters.
[Edit] Oh, and what political parties the MP or council are!
Here's an idea: aggregate available APIs (Google, Zoopla, TFL) to help people make decisions which neighbourhood(s) might be right for them. Make users answer questions (e.g. What newspapers you read? Where do you work or regularly commute to? Do you have children? etc) and narrow the options based on the answers.
Very cool! It would be nice to be able to group multiple cities in one map. Greater London and the City of London are listed separately so Greater London has a big hole in the middle.
Awesome, thanks for considering the feedback! Signed up for your mailing list and am excited to see how this develops :)
One quick follow-up for #1, I wonder if a political boundaries layer would be helpful? Like districts for state/federal House, or local government divisions. When I lived in Chicago, being able to filter by ward would've been great. It's only gonna get more confusing as gerrymandering increases :)
Best of luck with the project, and thanks again for taking this on!
Thanks for the pastebin code. I've added London to my list for now, and I'd be interested to seeing the results with all possible cities if you wanted to merge your code in github.
Wow; this is great to see. I have recently done something similar in the Greater Manchester, UK area. I've been looking for a house and wrote some code to scrape rightmove.co.uk and zoopla.com to get the house data. Checked their locations against data from http://data.police.uk/. Checked time to walk to the nearest metro or railway station and time to cycle to work. Metro and Railway station locations were scraped from wikipedia and time to travel was taken from Google Maps.
From all this, as well as £s per m^2 of floor space I ordered by the least compromise.
Currently trying to clean it all up and turn it into a webapp to make it useful for anyone else who wants to find property in an area.
I'm about to complete on the purchase of my first house and am really looking forward to it. It's not perfect; but I know for the price, I can't get much better.
If I finish the webapp; I might try and include data such as walking distance to the nearest pub from CAMRAs Good Beer Guide and maybe something similar for restaurants.
We've spent the last few weeks building Locatable, a property search website for London. We've integrated lots of transport data (tube/rail/road) to help you figure out where to live. Road travel times are a bit off at the moment, but we're working on it. Just looking to get feedback from other HNers, let us know what you think!
I'd love to see more of the sort of information for other cities, seems like it could be brought together in some sort of wiki or OSM-based system to allow crowd-sourced data.
In principle it should be possible to do the same for any city. The hardest part is getting the data and massaging it into shape, which can be somewhat tedious. London is a fairly "easy" city for this due to the large amount of open data that's readily available from the ONS and the like.
Better than geographic would be state (counties for other countries) level break-down charts, as well. It would demonstrate the gross disparity between, say, Silicon Valley and DFW or Oslo and Trømso or Dublin and Cork.
Glad you're excited about it. We don't have a date yet but we're working hard to get it out as soon as we feel it's ready. And London to start with, though we already have plans for other cities (so long as the data exists).
For the most part extending to the whole country shouldn't be too difficult (famous last words!) -- most of the data sources I'm currently using aren't specific to London. But I think I'll probably first go deep rather than wide, allowing the user to look at areas at a more granular level should they wish to.
Politics is on the todo list as well!
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