<story><title>Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki</title><url>http://www.wanhala.net/post/156484186523/figuring-out-the-best-place-to-live-in-helsinki</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>alkonaut</author><text>I did a similar one for Stockholm but for the greater metro area rather than on street level, for the commute time &lt;i&gt;into&lt;/i&gt; the city (When I was looking for a place to live outside). I
What I really wanted to do was find &amp;quot;underpriced areas&amp;quot; where commutes are faster than house prices indicate.&lt;p&gt;In this case I simply took a large number of addresses, ran them through the API for public transit for a random fixed workday (A tuesday morning 8 am commute) to a fixed central address. Then I plotted the times in a heatmap in the format Google maps uses and made a map overlay with the heat map.&lt;p&gt;It makes a nice spiral galaxy like map where the commuter train stations make little islands of short commute time far away from the city.&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commutemap.azurewebsites.net&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;commutemap.azurewebsites.net&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Static pic if you don&amp;#x27;t want to zoom in it and eat my free azure bandwidth... &lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prnt.sc&amp;#x2F;e57bsc&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;prnt.sc&amp;#x2F;e57bsc&lt;/a&gt;). Thinking about it now the dang thing ended up being completely static so it should be possible to just host for free somewhere (github?) rather than cloud. Uses my msdn &amp;quot;testing&amp;quot; sub now...&lt;p&gt;Outcome: bought place in the orange&amp;#x2F;red area and started working from home instead :)&lt;p&gt;Limitations: 1) target address is fixed, new target (e.g. new job location) needs a whole new map. But central stockholm is pretty small and walkable so this works pretty well if your office is central. 2) Interpolation between known points&amp;#x2F;addresses uses no kind of path finding. It assumes you can walk e.g. 200m in a straight line from an address to the closest bus stop. That might not be what you want to do if it e.g. means crossing water...</text></comment>
<story><title>Figuring out the best place to live in Helsinki</title><url>http://www.wanhala.net/post/156484186523/figuring-out-the-best-place-to-live-in-helsinki</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>juskrey</author><text>In this type of the task only payoff makes sense. 
With 30B+ paths and additional f(x) of path and sum of paths, real life optimization is not really possible - I&amp;#x27;ll bet in the middle of the night that some simple heuristics (e.g. proximity to one of the major transport hubs) will perform much much better. And city prices are likely already reflecting this, contrary to what author claims.</text></comment>