[drooby]

This is cool but I don't think it fits my use case..

Seems like I have to pick criteria that have exact venues.. I want to pick abstract things like "walking distance from grocery", "biking distance from climbing gym" "1 hour drive to national park"

[WiggleGuy]

Hello!

To echo what loxias said, it is possible to make queries like this on the heatmap. You can use the "Search Nearby places" button - this takes in more general queries (like cafe, gym, walmart, etc) and gives you back a bunch of venues that fit that search.

[duskwuff]

This doesn't seem to work very well. Searching for "grocery store" netted me a set of 22 locations spread across the entire country.

[WiggleGuy]

Ah, you probably tried to search before the website got your location (so it couldn't bias your search).

I'll make this an impossible state, thanks for bringing this up.

[abdullahkhalids]

I would like to not give my location to the website. Let me just pick a city manually.

[WiggleGuy]

That's fair!

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978067

[blehn]

I don't really understand what the search nearby places button is doing. I think the solution would be to allow some sort of OR operator (which seems straightforward), or conditions the act on generic queries (which seems more difficult). For example say you live in NYC and want some nice green space near you. Choosing a single park is too narrow and choosing all parks is too broad. So you should be able to say e.g. "Central Park OR Prospect Park OR Brooklyn Bridge Park OR Fort Greene Park", or you should be able to say "Park, > 10 acres, 4+ star google rating, has tennis court, has bike path"... the point is that not all parks, grocery stores, coffee shops, etc are equal; I need to be able to qualify them somehow.

[WiggleGuy]

I missed this comment!

> Central Park OR Prospect Park OR Brooklyn Bridge Park OR Fort Greene Park

You can do this, actually. I kinda explain that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976053

The heatmap supports both AND and OR clauses

The second one (acrage, stars, etc) is harder, you're right.

The "Search nearby places" is really meant to be a convenience feature to fill your OR clauses. It works better for certain types of things. Like, sure, all parks is too broad because not all parks are equal. But use it for something like all Targets (the shopping chain) or something, and its more useful, since those are, more or less, all equal.

I'm still thinking of other convenience features for places that have more nuance, like parks.

[ghostpepper]

You might prefer a more general walkability map, eg. https://www.walkscore.com

[loxias]

I found it was surprisingly easy to "populate with every instance of a given type". I've made a few maps based on grocery and transit where I did it by adding all >100 stores & stops.

[ajross]

"Total count of non-national-chain restaurants within a 1km walk" pretty much determines my criterion. Everything else is a once a week thing or less. The homes themselves are just a bunch of rooms, and I'm flexible. Quality of life is defined by my stomach.

[wilted-iris]

Same, and I add one even more amorphous criteria, 'not directly next to noise pollution like an airport or highways.'