TripTrop Archive

Last week Brooklyn resident Jonathan Soma launched a new Google Maps mashup named TripTrop. You enter an address into TripTrop and it displays a map showing you how far to any other location. It appears to work with subways and walking distances. Currently TripTrop only works in NYC although Soma notes that he will expand to other cities if there’s enough interest.

Flavorwire has an interview with Soma where he discusses where the TripTrop idea came from, how he decided on a name and how he calculates the time between stations. Soma notes that he used Amazon EC2 processing to determine over 120,000 points and the actual final overlays are stored on Amazon S3.

I did some basic tests and the results seem pretty darn close to 100% accurate. Of course the map results don’t take into account sick passengers, stalled trains, bad signals, etc.  TripTrop looks like it could be a very useful service.