Homes near transit are some of the only properties that have appreciated in value over the last year¹—yet other than Estately.com, we haven’t found any real estate sites that let you find homes near transit.

Yesterday we took a baby step towards helping people find walkable, transit-friendly homes with the release of our Transit Time Maps.  Eventually, real estate sites will be able to use this technology for searches like, “Find me homes within a 30 minute transit commute from work.”

Here’s how far you can travel in 45 minutes on transit from Market and Powell in SF (click to see the interactive version):

Check out the BART stops in the East Bay!

Here’s how far you can travel on transit in 45 minutes from 4th and Pike in Seattle:

And yes, homes near transit are better for the environment, your health, energy independence, and your sanity.

But wait… how does Walk Score calculate all those shortest path trees over the transit graph in real-time?  Enter Graphserver by Brandon Martin-Anderson.  Graphserver is an open source multi-modal trip planner (think open source Google Transit).  Anyone can contribute to Graphserver and it’s free to use.

Plus, Brandon rides a really sweet Schwinn tandem bike all by himself (we are still trying to figure out why):

News update from Brandon: He says, “People ride alone in their cars all the time so what’s the big deal about me riding my bike alone?”

Mike Mathieu, founder of Front Seat (makers of Walk Score), will be speaking at O’Reilly’s ETech conference today.

Mike’s talk “Save the Programmer, Save the Planet” outlines the emerging civic software movement where tech-savvy heroes leverage new web technologies to build software with a social impact.  Mike will talk about software solutions to problems that seem unrelated to software.  For example, government corruption, housing the homeless, and halting climate change.

You can watch an early version of this talk from Startpad Seattle or follow Mike on Twitter.