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Comment by mstngl

7 hours ago

These are really important questions when evaluating a place to live. The point about “tourism” is somehow covered by mentioning the nearest national park—unfortunately only in the US, which leads to Arcadia National Park for all European locations. In times of endless possibilities for AI-driven data and meta-analysis, this seems all the more poorly done and unimaginative.

Following up on this! Instead of just patching the empty state, we built out a proper 'Local Nature' integration using OpenStreetMap.

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.

  • FYI this appears broken. Neither Sydney nor London provide any results, and browser logs suggest that actually the "/parks" endpoint is returning 502.

    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.

    • Thank you, I think we have the search fixed, but yeah only having Parks show is not ideal and wasn't the intent. We're just dealing with a hodge-podge of API's with rate limits and several layers of caching trying to make things work lol.

      Reserves like Drivers Triangle, Rea, and Blue Gum are showing for me in Sydney Now.

This is an early Alpha and we actually were considering locking it down to the US initially but I think it's important to get out there early and expose problems like this. All valid points.