I do feel like one of the main disadvantages of Sydney over London is that it's 3411 miles from the nearest "national" park, instead of 3074 miles away.
Other than the "national" park comparison and non metric units, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add non-US cities. However it feels pretty surface level. Comparing Sydney and London, all I can really deduce is that Sydney is sunnier and more rainy, but there's nothing about what it feels like to live there.
Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?
Haha yeah, that needs some refinement! Ultimately it's a restriction of the API's we're using now.
"Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?"
These are all great suggestions, and some are on the roadmap. One thing is we never want to get in the game of saying one place is "Better" or "Worse" than another. We just want to provide data and let people decide what's important.
These are really important questions when evaluating a place to live. The point about “tourism” is somehow covered by mentioning the nearest national park—unfortunately only in the US, which leads to Arcadia National Park for all European locations. In times of endless possibilities for AI-driven data and meta-analysis, this seems all the more poorly done and unimaginative.
Following up on this! Instead of just patching the empty state, we built out a proper 'Local Nature' integration using OpenStreetMap.
International cities now have their own dedicated row showing real local reserves and parks (e.g., Tiergarten for Berlin) instead of a broken generic fallback. It's live now if you want to take another look. Thanks again for highlighting this early.
FYI this appears broken. Neither Sydney nor London provide any results, and browser logs suggest that actually the "/parks" endpoint is returning 502.
I'd encourage you to go much wider than parks. Outdoor space is good for certain interests, but not others. Beaches for example are not parks, but might be preferential to be close to for many. Cycle infrastructure for others. Nightlife for more folks, etc.
Also beware what gets classed as a park. Sydney has lots of parks, but they range from a tree and a bench between two houses (still named and mapped!) to large green spaces, to public sports spaces, to national parks. It would look strange to show the nearest bench to the centre of the city while ignoring easy access to large parks, as it would also be odd to say that there is a national park 20km away while ignoring the fact that the local space is very green.
Thank you, I think we have the search fixed, but yeah only having Parks show is not ideal and wasn't the intent. We're just dealing with a hodge-podge of API's with rate limits and several layers of caching trying to make things work lol.
Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.
This is an early Alpha and we actually were considering locking it down to the US initially but I think it's important to get out there early and expose problems like this. All valid points.
Funny. Comparing NYC to Philly, I see the distance to park/preserve shows local green spaces. Not what I expected. Maybe statistics are better when you’re a major metro?
100%, we want to add that but the data is expensive. If this has legs we will probably spring for Zillow or Redfin API access.
We actually hit a rate limit with the image API tonight, but we're caching everything we pull into a DB, so the more people use it, the less we'll have to rely on API calls.
We want to add home prices and rent, but that is really expensive data unfortunately. If this has legs, we may be able to justify paying for the Zillow API or something similar. We do plan on adding affiliate links to realtors in that city, although that's not nearly as helpful.
There's also an entire "Explore" section of this site we're working on once the database reaches a higher level of maturity. We want to do all the filtering you're mentioning.
Great catch! It turns out there is a tiny village in Gloucestershire also named Cambridge (pop. 394) that was trying to steal the spotlight from the University town. Because they were both labeled as 'Cambridge, England,' our system was getting them mixed up.
I've just pushed a fix that includes the County for international cities to keep them distinct (e.g., 'Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK'). I also cleared our database cache so the correct data is ready for you.
If you already have Cambridge in your comparison grid, just remove it and add it back to see the fresh data. Thanks for the heads-up.
Other than the "national" park comparison and non metric units, I was pleasantly surprised that I could add non-US cities. However it feels pretty surface level. Comparing Sydney and London, all I can really deduce is that Sydney is sunnier and more rainy, but there's nothing about what it feels like to live there.
Would I feel happier? What are the cultural differences? What is the food like? What sort of social groups thrive in the cities? What's public transport like? What's commuting like? What's tourism like?
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