Well done. I hacked together something similar about a year ago when I moved to San Francisco, because I needed a place within walking distance to my work, within walking distance to BART (for my girlfriend's commute), and that allows cats [1]. It helped me find the perfect place.
It's cool to see that there is now a general-purpose tool like the one that I made last year. I'll definitely use it next time I move. A couple things about this tool weren't obvious to me on my first experience:
1) I didn't know what a "walk score" was. I looked briefly for an explanation on the site, but didn't find one. At first I thought higher was worse, as if it were a measure of how far you had to walk to get to work. But by playing around on the site for a bit, it seems like higher is better, and it seems to be a measure of how accessible shops and necessities are by walking out your front door (that alone is really cool). My apartment scores a 92.
2) One implication of not understanding the "walk score" was that I thought the walk score filter was to limit the search results by how long your commute was. When I input my work address, my apartment wasn't within the search radius, so I actually wanted to expand the search radius. (Walking 2 miles to work everyday is a nice way to get some exercise, but my commute is only 10 minutes if I decide to bike.) It took me a minute to notice the "time" filter at the top of the page.
3) Lastly, I didn't see how to filter by whether a place allows dogs or cats, but then I found that you can expand the filter box to filter by pets, price, and bedrooms. Perfect.
Now that I've figured out those three issues, the site is easy to use and I look forward to using it next time I move. It makes the tool that I hacked together for this purpose obsolete.
Yes, Padmapper does this general kind of thing but it doesn't offer the ability to limit a search based on commute times (which is the title of the post.)
I was corrected in another post and neglected to update this one. I just couldn't see the options for some reason (perhaps because they were super secret :)).
It's cool to see that there is now a general-purpose tool like the one that I made last year. I'll definitely use it next time I move. A couple things about this tool weren't obvious to me on my first experience:
1) I didn't know what a "walk score" was. I looked briefly for an explanation on the site, but didn't find one. At first I thought higher was worse, as if it were a measure of how far you had to walk to get to work. But by playing around on the site for a bit, it seems like higher is better, and it seems to be a measure of how accessible shops and necessities are by walking out your front door (that alone is really cool). My apartment scores a 92.
2) One implication of not understanding the "walk score" was that I thought the walk score filter was to limit the search results by how long your commute was. When I input my work address, my apartment wasn't within the search radius, so I actually wanted to expand the search radius. (Walking 2 miles to work everyday is a nice way to get some exercise, but my commute is only 10 minutes if I decide to bike.) It took me a minute to notice the "time" filter at the top of the page.
3) Lastly, I didn't see how to filter by whether a place allows dogs or cats, but then I found that you can expand the filter box to filter by pets, price, and bedrooms. Perfect.
Now that I've figured out those three issues, the site is easy to use and I look forward to using it next time I move. It makes the tool that I hacked together for this purpose obsolete.
[1] https://github.com/dcuddeback/apartment-scrape