Mapnificient: Be There in 15 Minutes

• November 8th 2010

by Mark Wellborn

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DCist has posted about the latest map technology du jour called Mapnificent, which shows the areas that you can reach in DC with public transportation from a specific address in a given amount of time.

All you do is place a pin at an address in the city and then set the slider to a specific number of minutes. A highlighted map will appear that encompasses the area that you will be able to reach via public transportation in that amount of time.

Creator Stefan Wehrmeyer makes the point that the tool is perhaps most useful for people who are either moving to a new city (or moving to a new address within a city) and want to know how long it will take them to get from that location to their place of employment.

However, the coolest function (in our opinion) is what we have dubbed “the meet-up” function.

Say you are living in Shaw and your friend lives in Van Ness and you want to meet up at a restaurant, but neither wants to travel more than 15 minutes via public transportation. If you plot both locations in Mapnificent and then click “Intersection,” a section of the city is highlighted that you both can reach via public transportation in 15 minutes. Then, by entering “restaurants” into the search function, the restaurants in the highlighted section pop up. (The latter function does not seem to be working that well for DC, but the site is still in beta testing mode.)

Mapnificent is currently operating in 20 cities around the world, including London and Berlin. For more information about how it works, click here.

This article originally published at http://dc.urbanturf.production.logicbrush.com/articles/blog/mapnificient_be_there_in_15_minutes/2653.