An Interactive Map

Seattle, if Distance Were Measured in Minutes

A map of Seattle where places sit as far apart as they feel from the driver's seat. The bridges stretch, and the far side of the water gets farther.

Three ways to measure the trip: by car at the speed limits, by car in Friday traffic, and by bus and rail on a weekday morning. See the note below.

Ballard and Magnolia face each other across Salmon Bay, close enough that a walker can cross between them at the locks in a few minutes. A driver cannot. The car trip loops inland to the Ballard Bridge and back around, and on a bad afternoon it can take twenty minutes. Ask a Seattle driver and they will tell you the two neighborhoods are nowhere near each other.

The map below redraws the city using travel time as distance. Drag the slider and watch Seattle move from the map you know to the shape of its trips. The buttons pick how you travel: by car on empty roads, in Friday traffic, or by transit on a weekday morning.

Five drives

Ballard and Capitol Hill are four and a half miles apart. The drive takes about 13 minutes on empty roads. Northgate and Pike Place are two miles farther apart, yet that drive takes nine. So the map draws Ballard and Capitol Hill 21 percent farther apart than the miles say, and Northgate and Pike Place 40 percent closer. Every row in the table works like that, and the transit column is the same trip by bus and rail, walking included. Tap a row to see the drive on the map: the solid line is the fastest way and the dashed line is the shortest way. They are rarely the same road.

Minutes average the two directions of each trip. Free flow means every road at its speed limit; Friday evening adds the measured traffic; transit rides the weekday-morning timetable.

What to look for

North-south distances shrink as you drag. Interstate 5 and Highway 99 make north-south driving fast, so those trips take fewer minutes than the miles suggest. The city squashes down the middle while the water crossings pull it wide.

The bridges stretch. A trip across the Ship Canal or the Duwamish has to go find a bridge, so the two banks sit farther apart in minutes than in miles. Watch the canal widen as they pull apart.

Then switch to Friday evening. Every trip gets longer, about a fifth on average, but not evenly. Traffic hits the freeways hardest, so the north-south shortcuts lose some of their edge, and downtown pushes everything around it farther away. The two maps are the same city at two different hours.

Then switch to transit. The city changes shape a third time, and more drastically. Light rail pulls Northgate, downtown, and Columbia City into a tight line, the way I-5 never quite manages by car. Away from the rail and the frequent buses, neighborhoods drift toward the edges: Magnolia to Capitol Hill is a 12-minute drive and a 47-minute ride. The transit map also fits a flat page worse than the driving maps, so expect bigger dots in X-ray.

The X-ray button shows what the map is built from: a honeycomb of sample points. No flat map can match every driving time at once, so some distances come out wrong. The bigger a dot, the more the map had to fudge the distances around it.

Why Seattle

Seattle's roads are unusually directional. The city is a north-south strip between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, and its only fast roads, Interstate 5 and Highway 99, run that direction. East-west trips have no highway and move on surface streets. On top of that, the Ship Canal cuts the city in half, so trips between the north and south halves funnel across a handful of bridges. Travel time here depends on direction more than in most American cities, and that difference is what an ordinary map cannot show.

To build it, a computer routed about 780,000 drives between 880 points on the street network, then nudged the points around until the distances between them matched the driving times as closely as possible. The result is the map above. How we made this map walks through the method, with pictures.