Hacker News Reader

Comment by inejge | Hacker News Reader

> Maybe I'm not understanding the use case. I don't want to "take the train".

The use case is routine. A lot of people, most of the time, do indeed want to "take the train". Heroic feats of real-time planning have their place, and it's great to have tools that help you with that, but routine can be covered with much simpler tools just as well.

Even in the Tokyo scenario you gave (which is fascinating -- thank you!) Google gives 30-40 min. for most public transit options, so for rough planning they're all equivalent. Taxi is faster, and bicycle is almost at par.

View on HN

never met that person. as someone that has long lived in cities with amazing transportation (sf is not one of those with good transportation) there are too many options and people always want whatever is best now, not routine.

you're out drinking - which mode is last. you're on the east side of X, which route is closest. you're tired, does any route guauntee a seat. etc....

Berlin, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Kyoto, Osaka. All this way . there is no "one train"

> never met that person.

Hello! Now you have.

In many cities certain parts of the transit network follow a star / hub-and-spoke layout. The station nearest to my house is on a spoke, and has trains going south and those going north. So for me, an in-home train display only really needs to show the next train in each direction.

And a lot of transit decisions are conditional on things the planning app doesn't know. Am I comfortable riding a hire bike, appropriately dressed, and carrying a helmet? Do I already have a return ticket for the light rail making it the obvious choice? Am I the kind of person who enjoys a brisk 20 minute walk?

Combine that with the fact that the multimodal transit apps don't understand fares, and I find it's simpler to just start the taxi app if you need a taxi.

> Combine that with the fact that the multimodal transit apps don't understand fares

Kakao Maps will give you exact timing and fares for every mode except air

> In many cities certain parts of the transit network follow a star / hub-and-spoke layout

Yeah those who live on a spoke and mostly go back and forth that spoke are a minority because the farthter away from the center the more space between the spokes:)

I feel like the OP is overcomplicating the solution, I don't own a car and all commuting is basically either:

- bus/train/tram crosses my stop 5 times a day - its trivial to learn the 5 times

- bus/train/tram crosses my stop more than 5 times a day - i just show up at the stop and wait

Perhaps my point of view is like this because I'm in Europe, I can't tell really.

Even though most times my train comes every 15 Minutes (and in other places even every 5), I still check for: Disruptions and I try to catch the train exactly. I often get on the platform a minute before the train departs and rarely miss it.

Are you sure you didn't mean 5 times per hour? Turn up and go for a six times a day service seems a bit optimistic :-)

I would find this slightly useful, I live in Madrid. For most of my trips I take the metro; I have two lines nearby, and they are frequent enough that I just show up. But there are a few parts of town that are just not well connected to my place by metro. If I want to go to Atocha, Cibeles or Piramides, the bus is better. But I have three buses that take me to each of those places, and they show up every 25 minutes. If I'm going there, I want to know which stop will have a bus soonest.

I also live in Madrid. Many years ago, wrote a bash script that downloaded the real time data for the bus stop nearest to home from the EMT website and read out loud the minutes for the next bus with festival. We had a keyboard next to the couch, many keys were shortcuts to execute commands like that one. So it was a matter of pushing a key and listening.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com