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?
"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.
Thanks for giving it a spin!
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.
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.
Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.
And something like Hoodmaps to discern safe/unsafe suburbs in a city (quality of life differs a lot within a city, often more than between cities)
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.
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 comment, thanks!
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.