Introducing Close

05 Apr 2024

A year ago, I released a blog post titled Is Seattle a 15-minute city? It depends on where you want to walk, which featured an interactive map of walking times to ten amenities around Seattle. The topic was personally and professionally interesting to me—I want to live in a walkable neighborhood, and I think there should be more of them.

The reaction to that post was overwhelming: it went viral on Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News, and ultimately made the front page of The Seattle Times. In the messages I received afterwards, two themes stood out:

• “Your map helped me decide where to live.”
• “If you made this map for my city, I would use it.”

Today, I’m excited to announce Close, an interactive travel time map for discovering walkable, bikeable, and transit-friendly neighborhoods across the United States.

Try Close: https://close.city/

Close brings the travel time map to a new scale:

• Covers 7.9 million blocks across all 50 states & Washington, D.C.
• Includes 35 destination types, with more to come
• Shows travel times for three modes of transit: walking, biking, and public transit

Close is currently in public beta. My top priority in the coming weeks is to build trust in the map by adding new data sources, refining vetting for existing sources, and incorporating users’ expert knowledge of their own neighborhoods.

As confidence in Close grows, I’ll roll out more tools for exploring the travel time map. I’ll also be sharing detailed analyses of the travel time data and building geospatial models to understand the foundations of vibrant neighborhoods across the country.

If you want to develop an analysis for your city or get early access to the data, I’d love to hear from you. You can also follow along by subscribing to the newsletter.

Much more to come,

Nathaniel Henry, D.Phil.
Director, Henry Spatial Analysis

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To learn more about Close, explore the map, read the About page, or get in touch.