[sbecker]

Hi, great write up and very cool project! I was wondering how you arrived at the idea to use OSRM and pre-computing the drive time from every exit to every POI. Was that something you learned existed along the way? Did Claude/codex point the way to this?

[tjohnell]

Hello, I appreciate the kind words. When I realized that radial search just wasn't going to be accurate (and potentially harmful given people might exit onto another interstate thinking they could grab some Wendy's), I posited to Claude: "I need to understand reachability of a POI from an exit, reachability being defined as driving time less than X amount of time". Claude then suggested two open-source projects: Valhalla & OSRM. I haven't done much research on Valhalla - Claude ultimately recommended OSRM for its "simplicity" but again, I don't honestly know if that's true. Claude can definitely be credited with my decision to choose OSRM.