I can care less about the distance when I take the bus across town. I am far more interested in how long it will take me to travel the ten miles from my home in St. Johns to downtown Portland.

What I need is TimeMaps, a prototype app I ran across in a post by Suzanne Barr on Co.Design. Vincent Merteens, a recent design school graduate developed TmeMaps for the Netherlands train system. It uses time to shape the way a map looks  It’s an app that grows and shrinks according to the time it takes to travel between two points. With TimeMaps, you enter the city where you are traveling from and where you want to go. It then creates a map with rings that change colors for every 30 minutes of travel.

TimeMaps demonstrates how time now serves as the fundamental aspect of travel. We don’t consider the distance, anymore. It’s increasingly irrelevant.

Merteens changes the perspective by showing how time affects the shape of the Netherlands by looking at it from the perspective of where you are located. For instance, if you are in Eindhoven, the map of the Netherlands is pretty small. The trips between cities is pretty quick and easy. But if you are in a remote village such as Stavoren, the Netherlands looks much bigger.

The map also changes in shape according to the time of day. At night, TimeMaps expands. Why? Traveling between two places at night can take a while. The trains are less frequent. There are fewer connections. During the day, the map shrinks as more trains run on more frequent schedules.

Here’s a demo:

Merteens has designs on building TimeMaps for any transit. It may be for the New York Subway or for Portland’s bike system. Either way, TimeMaps points to a future where maps are less about distance and more about the nuances of trave timel