opentimes
last updated: Mar 18, 2025
Today I’m launching OpenTimes, a free database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between major U.S. Census geographies. In addition to letting you visualize travel isochrones, OpenTimes also lets you download massive amounts of travel time data for free and with no limits. Visit the dedicated about page to learn more about the project.
Very cool!
The entire OpenTimes backend is just static Parquet files on Cloudflare’s R2. There’s no RDBMS or running service, just files and a CDN. The whole thing costs about $10/month to host and costs nothing to serve. In my opinion, this is a great way to serve infrequently updated, large public datasets at low cost (as long as you partition the files correctly).