Transit Panel | Hacker News Reader

Transit Panel

kerrickstaley.com

36 pointsKerrickStaley11 comments

Nice, I love seeing people work on projects to improve access to public transit.

Regarding a similar project, I've written some backends[1] for the smashing[2] dashboard to show real time locations of buses and estimated arrival times at stops. I run it on a raspberry pi connected to a TV in my front room. When I get up, I turn on the TV and have my weather, calendar, some headlines, and an ETA for my bus to get to work.

Some apartment buildings in LA are using my dashboard to show the nearby buses too.

[1] https://blog.line72.net/2019/08/02/announcing-realtime-bus-t...

[2] https://smashing.github.io/

[3] https://github.com/line72/smashing-availtec

Reminds me of TransitScreen (rebranded to Actionfigure). I remember seeing one at friend's building in NYC, showing time to the next subway, train, Uber, citibike availability, etc. I loved the look of it and always thought about building something similar for my home.

https://actionfigure.ai/

Yeah, I've seen the TransitScreen product and it was a partial inspiration for this idea :)

This would also be nice with one of those little e-ink displays and a Raspberry Pi Zero, maybe.

I know someone who wrote a small app to control a LIFX globe in a similar fashion.

When the next tram was 5-10 minutes away, it would light up green indicating now would be a good time to walk out the door.

(data fetched from tramtracker.com.au)

I have a ton of Fire tablets and I would love more projects using them. If anyone has any ideas please link me to them. I will absolutely take a stab at something like this.

That was the original business plan for NextBus. They were going to sell people little boxes that did displays like that. The data came in over a pager radio channel.

I also live in Jersey City and would use this. Which station is this relative to?

The walking times are from my apartment building at 45 Park Ln S. I timed my walk from my apartment door to the train door a few times and added a bit of buffer. I might be able to make these walk times configurable using URL parameters; I will update this thread if I do that. Or you could self-host this: it’s just a static site with a few HTML, JavaScript, and image files.

I think I understand now – while I saw the adjustable walk time variables in the JS, I just wasn't sure which station your timer were relative to.

Looking at your building location, I see you're near the Hoboken stop. That's why you have the Hoboken departure times hard-coded in the departure_times.js.

I thought the file was just the line schedule and then you'd have to pick a station, but I see now it's just the schedule for the Hoboken station?

Yes, the app only supports departures from the Hoboken station.

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