Dan Snow announced the launch of OpenTimes, “a free database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between major U.S. Census geographies.”

The primary goal here is to enable research and fill a gap I noticed in the open-source spatial ecosystem. Researchers (social scientists, economists) use large travel time matrices to quantify things like access to healthcare, but they often end up paying Google or Esri for the necessary data. By pre-calculating times between commonly-used research geographies (i.e. Census) and then making those times easily accessible via SQL, I hope to make large-scale accessibility research cheaper and simpler.

The idea here is bulk data for research purposes: think isochrones, not individualized route navigation.