Location cues like "near the lake" or "near the train station" or "near the homeless camp" are critical pieces of information for me before I pick a target.

I wonder if some sort of projection would help there: expand areas around the points of interest, and compress space between points.

Perhaps morphing the physical map to match the time would work?

Haven't fully thought it through, but I think such a projection would be unintelligible in most cases - it would probably only look remotely 'intuitive' if travel time would always increase with distance.

For a real city, it would likely just be very weirdly morphed blobs of the map all cut up and smushed back together, with bizarrely curved roads, non-aligning roads & train lines, etc.

Now I definitely want to see that map, just for kicks.

Here's such a map for Singapore we created quite a while ago: http://xiaoji-chen.com/2011/isochronic-singapore/ http://www.chsommer.com/isosin.htm

The more I think about this, the more I'm convinced it'll work. Somehow making the map truly dynamic by changing the scale according to the time it takes to reach the destination will be helpful. So the scale of the map changes as per the traffic and other factors that affect the time taken to reach specific destinations. This should work, yeah.

Best, although I don't really know how you'd do it computationally, would be something like a London Subway map... schematically correct but only geographically accurate in a broad sense.

How about deform the physical map by a deformation field defined by ETA (i.e. stretch and compress)? e.g. https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/4.2/Modules/Deform...

What would be cool about this is that it is still a map of the map, but the unit becomes time adjusted mile.

Perhaps you can go even further and try to make it so that any two points have pairwise correct distances, like in the Azimuthal equidistant projection?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azimuthal_equidistant_projecti...

Perhaps there are metric functions where this is not possible (a quick proof eludes me...[1]), but approximations might be possible anyway.

[1] Edit: actually it's quite simple. Any non-isotropic metric cannot have an Euclidean equidistant projection, simply take a pair of points lying in rays (1,0) and (0,1) in an L^p metric, p not 2, as a counterexample.

Edit2: Forget everything I said :) My geometry is quite rusty I guess. Not only any non-isotropic metric cannot have an Euclidean equidistant projection, any non-Euclidean metric clearly can't have an Euclidean equidistant projection. Metric spaces are defined by pairwise distances! What you can do however, is make the distance to 1 or 2 arbitrarily chosen points correct.

I actually did this for my bachelor's thesis[1] (maps on p52-53). It's not a pure time-distance representation (constraints on angular distortion to preserve similarity to conventional maps), but anyway. Data is from railway/tram time tables.

[1] http://lazarus.elte.hu/hun/digkonyv/szakdolg/2013-bsc/baranc... (in Hungarian)

And given a suitable vector representation of the street layout, the stretch-and-compress could be given constraints so as not to warp (i.e. curve streets on) the map

My thought exactly.

I think the idea is to keep mobile and desktop in sync here. And mobile doesn't have a "finger over" event I think.

Peek/Pop works on iOS for 6S and above.

Press and hold?

It would be neat if they skewed the map to match travel times.

I don’t think this is a transformation that can be performed by only stretching and deforming the surface (e.g., the maps of a city with time units vs distance units aren’t homomorphic).

Imagine starting on the far south end of a congested city surrounded by a circular, relatively low-traffic highway. Points on the northern end of the city would be “closer” on such a map than points directly in the center.

You could certainly define a transformation that accounts for this, but I think it would necessarily defy most people’s intuitive interpretation of such a map.

You could resolve it by cutting the circular highway att the furthest point, and let the surrounded are baloon out. The map would still make sense close to the user.

i agree. hover a geo map and have an easy 'hide this' button to hit that will remove the entry and take you back to the timemap.

choosing where to go for lunch will be a flash.

Mapumental[1] does something like this - it shows how far you can get with public transport from a postcode in a certain amount of time.

[1] https://mapumental.com/)

It really shines in dense urban areas like the example in Oakland CA. The route overlay would be really important if there's anything like super busy roads or no sidewalks available.

or just keep the "time circles", only make them not circles but rather a spline connecting all the 5-minute-away dots.

Hovering? Like with a mouse?

It's still easy to forget that many people use applications on devices with only primitive input options available :).

Yup, if I'm looking for directions I'm probably on my phone, not at a computer. I guess others didn't get the point/joke, hence the downvotes?

I wrote my comment vaguely on purpose, but 19 hours later: yes, I meant touchscreen as primitive input mechanisms, compared to a mouse pointer.