Today launched OpenTimes, a free database of pre-computed travel times between major U.S. Census geographies.

• Allows visualizing travel isochrones and downloading massive travel time data freely without limits.
• Dedicated about page for more info.

Primary goal is to enable research and fill a gap in the open-source spatial ecosystem.

• Researchers use large travel time matrices but often pay for data.
• Pre-calculates times between commonly used research geographies and makes them accessible via SQL.

Data example as a table:

• origin_id, destination_id, duration_sec
• Shows specific travel time data between different geographies.

Homepage map shows isochrone map of travel times:

• Isochrone map of travel times

Interesting technical stuff:

• Backend is static Parquet files on Cloudflare’s R2 with no RDBMS or running service, just files and a CDN, costs about $10/month to host.
• Travel times calculated by pre-building inputs and distributing compute over hundreds of GitHub Actions jobs, completely free.
• Query layer uses a single DuckDB database file with views pointing to static Parquet files via HTTP, can query large records after downloading a small pointer file.
• Map frontend uses hyparquet library to query the same static Parquet files as DuckDB and is super responsive once cached.