Show HN: Twin Cities Transit "Where's My Bus?" | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Twin Cities Transit "Where's My Bus?"

tctransit.mobi

24 pointspwenzel13 comments

Thanks for posting! I live in Minneapolis and rely on the bus system for transport. So far it's easier to use than the NextTrip website on my phone.

For my usual trip each day there are several buses that work for me, and what I was hoping for is a site that centers a map on my location (from my phone gps) and shows me all buses in my general vicinity. I would use this to select a route.

That's definitely something I've been thinking about. It adds another level of complexity though, so I'm taking my time with it.

Do I add some type of "sign-in" functionality to save bookmarks to a profile? Or just let people save bookmarks to a cookie? (by bookmarks, I mean stops)

While this is far from perfect, it's my attempt at doing geo-location: http://mtransit.herokuapp.com/geo

Ideally it'd plot on a Google Map all germane results.

I've made a similar app with slightly different navigation using the same Nextrip API: http://mtransit.herokuapp.com/schedule/17900

I need to tweak my full-text search and general layout. But your addition of maps is a nice touch. Adding the location of the stop with a separate icon may be a nice addition.

Nice to see what other developers are doing with the Nextrip API. I think the market for transit data is going to get pretty busy in the near future!

As an aside, stops are marked with a red marker icon, and buses with a bus icon. This is consistent with the regular "stop" map displayed by default on departure listings. The map icons need a little love, and I'm open to suggestions.

Ah, I understand the map now. I'm bleary-eyed and missed that.

My grand vision was to do a comet-style app where you see the buses "move" towards your position/stop on a Google Map -- but I haven't been able to sit down and design that yet.

They've added a few more endpoints recently:

http://svc.metrotransit.org/NexTrip/help

Although, I am annoyed because:

NexTrip/{ROUTE}/{DIRECTION}/{STOP}

does not accept the same kind of IDs as the main endpoint 'NexTrip/{STOPID}' and also there are not valid {STOP} ids for every stop on a route.

It's true. I've also caught a stop ID with a space in it, which seemed kind of non-standard. It caused an error that I was able to fix.

Otherwise the API is a nice service. Previous versions of TCTransit relied on scraping. Dirty, but it still performed nicely.

I wish Philadelphia provided easy access to real-time transit information. I think the city is finally starting to release that information publicly via APIs. Hopefully we'll have something soon.

Very nice app. Nice UI. Just made me realize how much I miss Minneapolis.

Where do u get the data for location of the bus? Is there someway, I can zoom out on the map?

Data comes from Metrotransit's API, updated at 30-second intervals.

Presently the maps are static images, as the site is designed first for mobile devices (desktop traffic represents less than 1% of my traffic).

I plan to have interactive maps for desktop users in the future.

You can click on the maps to see your stop in Google Maps, or the Google Maps app on your mobile device.

Nice. This is much better than Metrotransit's mobile website.

Nice effort.

I use nextbus.com here in Boston and used it back at school at Rutgers. While their mobile website is pretty nifty, the web UI needs quite some work.

We have a really nice bus tracking system here in Gainesville. It is located here:

http://ufl.transloc.com/

The desktop website uses flash, but the mobile website uses Javascript. What's really nice is how it uses Google Maps and overlays bus positions in real time. The bus positions are accurate to within a few seconds, so I can decide exactly when to leave for the bus stop and which bus to take.

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