commutefrom.com is a free service that helps you decide where to buy a house around London. It tells you which stations are within your preferred commute time of the central London tube station nearest to your work. It also tells you the average house prices in the area.

Let's suppose you work near Waterloo. You could spend £500k on a home in Hinchley Wood that's a 26 mins commute. Or you could buy a house in nearby Wimbledon, 19 mins from work, where the average house costs £300k.

Use the search facility at the top of the page if you have a specific enquiry. e.g. “where can I commute from, to get to Chancery Lane in 30-40 mins”. Results can either be viewed on the map or in a table. If you're just browsing, explore the map by clicking and dragging. Click on stations for house prices and commuting times. More advice in About.

Search results:
stations
(click to show details on map)

about commutefrom.com

commutefrom.com is a free service that helps you find the best place to live in and around London, based upon where you work, your budget for your new home, how long you're prepared to travel between the two, and other personal requirements. With a simple search, you can identify all the places to live that are within a certain commute time of central London train stations. For example, if you work in the city near Liverpool Street and want your journey from home to be no longer than 30 minutes, you could buy in Romford or White Hart Lane. But commutefrom.com will tell you that, with house prices 34% higher, you get a lot less for your money in White Hart Lane.

the story

"My fiancee had just changed jobs, so we were both working in London. It made sense to move closer as we were spending over 2.5 hours a day on public transport. But finding out the best place to live wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. I ended up customising a train map, jotting down times for various journeys between work and around where we wanted to live. As cost was an important consideration, I then added house prices. Eventually, I was able to narrow down our options, eliminating the places to live that involved a long commute, or where the housing was extortionate.

"That weekend, we were telling friends about my latest project. They too were thinking of moving and asked if they could borrow the customised map. It then struck me how it could be turned into an online resource that would be useful to a huge number of people. And commutefrom.com was born. We''ve done all the hard work - a simple search is all that's now needed to arm yourself with the information you need to make that life-changing decision."

Ian Jones - founder of commutefrom.com

in the press

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the data

journeys

The train journey data comes from the published train time tables. The 'min time' field on this site is the minimum journey time during the peak commuting period - the 6 options that arrive at the destination before 08:30 am. You can click on any of these times to be taken to the national rail website to get the full details on these journeys. The 'changes' field is the number of station changes for the option with the shortest journey time. The 'frequency' field is the average time between trains during the commuting period. This data is updated as soon as possible after a timetable change.

house prices

The average house price data is take from the statistics published by the land registry. This data gives you an idea of how expensive property is in an area - and how much you get for your money. Anywhere on this site, where there is an average house price figure, you can click on it to be shown more details (eg average prices for different property types). These links go to a page supplied by the BBC, which provides a simpler view of the data than the land registry site. This data is updated as soon as possible after the land registry releases new figures.

to do list

There are always things we can do to make commutefrom.com better. Here is a short list of the big things we want to add to this site, and we'll get to them in time. Give us some feedback if there is something that you think is missing.

  • data:
    • season ticket prices
    • train operator reliabilty
    • tube journeys
  • functionality
    • general performance and robustness improvements
    • no JavaScript version for older browsers
    • autocomplete station name in search form
    • sorting of tables
    • the classic AJAX issue - 'fix' the browser back/forward buttons.

the map

The map shows the major commuting routes to London. It does not show every train line in the area. In the interest of simplicity, it also does not show every interchange accurately for simplicity. Please refer to the national rail maps for these details.

technology

Being geeks, we're always interested in how websites do what they do. So we though we'd let you know how we do things here. On the server side we use a standard LAMP configuration (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). The site makes a lot of use of AJAX, communicating in JSON. For encoding JSON in PHP we use Services_JSON. On the client side we make heavy use of the excellent moo tools JavaScript library for AJAX, animation, and other things. Dia was used to draw the map.

disclaimer

commutefrom.com accepts no liability for its users being late to work based upon commutefrom.com data (i.e. we can't guarantee that the data is always perfectly up to date), or making bad decisions about where to live (don't blame us if you buy a place somwhere where the housing is cheapest, and it turns out to not to be a very nice place).

copyright

All images, maps, text and information on commutefrom.com is copyrighted.

© commutefrom.com 2007 - 2008