Live map of SF MUNI | Hacker News Reader

Live map of SF MUNI

sflivebus.com

126 pointsvikrum51 comments

Awesome!

Now, nitpicking: When the badges move, the speed is not realistic. Of course, that's only natural, because it's just an update to its new position, it's not actual motion. But it's still jarring to see buses zooming across 3 blocks in 5 seconds. :)

Would it be possible to visualize the position update in a different way, to better suggest it's just a position update, not actual motion? I'm thinking, leave the badge in its old place temporarily, make a new badge that moves quickly to the new place, and leave a faint low-contrast or transparent "trail" connecting the two. Once the new badge is in the updated position, remove the old badge and the trail.

Basically, the whole transition should be much quicker, and clearly indicate it's an update, not actual motion.

"But it's still jarring to see buses zooming across 3 blocks in 5 seconds."

Not far from reality with some of the bus drivers in this city.

Replicate the functionality of transloc (try ncsu.transloc.com) and it'll be golden. Filtering routes and visible route paths!

This is called dead reckoning[1]. Given the previous two locations you can tell the speed. Since you know the route the bus will take, you just plot it where it would be if it never stopped moving since the last update. It's pretty close 90% of the time.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning

I'm not sure if the're using dead reckoning. I just saw one turn. To me this looks more like gps.

Also, Go Wolf Pack!

As I said, if it is something like a bus where the route is known, dead reckoning is still effective.

Even with GPS you usually only get location updates every few seconds, DR fills in the "smoothness" between updates.

Related weirdness--if you leave the tab running in the background and then return to it, all the icons drift from their position when the tab was backgrounded to their latest locations. Kind of reminds me of turning on the light in the kitchen and seeing cockroaches running for cover.

It can take 10-30 seconds for the map to catch up, and in the meantime the map is not very useful.

Maybe test for how out-of-date the map is and do a 'hard refresh' of position.

This map would be more useful if instead of each bus being represented by a nondescript MUNI logo, that it was an icon that contained the route number. As it stands it appears the only way to get useful information is to hover over each logo to work out what it represents.

Just merged in a pull request from @templaedhel on GitHub—take a look now. Thanks for the feedback!

It would be nice to be able to select just one bus/train so that I can see when/where the next bus is.

I guess this gives nice visualization to the deplorable state of Muni. Right now I see nine L trains clustered basically on top of each other in the Sunset.

Maybe one between market and West Portal and one on market near Embarcadero. I take the J and as usual I see independent cars running outbound right next to each other with unusually large and sporadic gaps between them.

Hard to believe $820 million for such a shitty service.

This is actually an inherent side-effect of any transit system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching

http://i.imgur.com/ENRtQBs.png

7 N-Judahs within 10 blocks of each other? Checks out.

I once saw 8 MUNI trains within 3 blocks on King St near the ballpark.

However, this is probably just stale data from the NextBus API :)

It looks like each car of a two-car train shows up separately?

But yeah, totally believable ;-)

Yup. Two car trains for some reason are a hack into pretty much every part of MUNI's systems. Thats why in the underground stations you used to hear "N N in 3 minutes." The audible announcements have since been updated, but the old arrival displays that show the screenshot of the control center computer (the squares on the teal lines) still show two car trains the same as two different trains very close together.

This is possible because of the NextBus API, where apparently NextBus is a private contractor used by many cities solely to provide this info.

If you click on "Select your transit system" on the NextBus website and scroll down for NYC, you'll see that the MTA's Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Brox services are covered (as well as the private "Downtown Connection" bus service in lower Manhattn) but that the normal MTA Manhattan service isn't covered. Does anyone know why? Maybe it's just in the process of being rolled out?

http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/agencySelector.jsp

No idea, it's a similar issue with the busses in LA, all of those that cooperate with the LA metro system are on nextbus, but the few that don't (santa monica) aren't on nextbus at all. I suspect it has something to do with cost of the hardware that the busses have.

NextBus was an east bay startup in the first dot com boom, actually, and my second job out of college. Muni was one of the launch installations. We were watching stuff like this (albeit with a decidedly clunkier hand-cooked map instead of Google integration) way back in 2000. I left in 2003, and they were acquired (without profit -- only investor shares were converted) a few years later.

Still, we didn't fail spectacularly, which says something. And going on 15 years later it's fun to see a bunch of my old code still running and doing useful things for society.

MTA has "bus time" which is not like nextbus in three important ways:

1: it is not a scam run by money grubbing jackasses to keep public data for private profit. 2: it is built entirely from open source software, and all the data is accessible with an open api.

3: the predictions are not a pack of lies.

http://bustime.mta.info/wiki/Developers/Index

Does a reasonable phone app utilize this yet?

It's easy to make a live map of Muni busses because they are hardly ever moving.

You don't even need an animated GIF! A single JPG is enough!

Love this, to chime in with suggestions, something with color indicating inbound/outbound would be awesome for seeing through some of the noise. Love the line selection idea as well.

Just pushed an update to show inbound and outbound. Thanks for the suggestion! :)

Do you have any examples of how you're populating Firebase from the SFMuni APIs?

Would love to see this as well.

I think this is these are his data sources:

agency list: http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command...

route list: http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command...

vehic location : http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command...

=====

Check out line 37: https://github.com/firebase/firebus/blob/gh-pages/nextbus/fi...

Thanks! I missed that on the first pass

When I traveled in Oslo, the excellent bus system had stops with realtime arrival information. Wonder if this can't be bootstrap into a similar system. (And an aside: Why oh why can't we have the same thing in SF?) Some examples below: http://www.flickr.com/photos/54493673@N00/388240155/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/21779731@N07/4876550088/

Muni does have that...

Also great is QuickMuni, an open source Android app with a really nice UI (including live maps) -- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worldofbil...

(No connection to the developer, though he spoke at Noisebridge's Five Minutes of Fame recently)

This is fantastic! Althought the "MUNI" marker is nice, I think a smaller icon (maybe with a direction?) would make it easier to use.

Someone already made a pull request to add this. I <3 Open Source! https://github.com/firebase/firebus/pull/1

Just accepted a pull request to make this way cleaner.

This would be awesome to pair this up with Twilio SMS so you know when your bus is just a few blocks aways from your location.

Cool!

Is there any way to filter it down to a single transit line?

No not yet—the actual route/path information is currently decoupled from the views and animations. Probably shouldn't be too difficult pull the information for published routes as well as do some processing on historic movement. Pull requests gladly accepted :)

Why isn't the iOS app compatible with the iPhone 4? Is it really that processor-intensive?

I just downloaded the iOS app, and you aren't really missing much. It looks like a proof-of-concept for using Firebase SDK, not a real intended for users app.

Crashed twice within the first few minutes, just a bunch of pins floating around SF with no indication of route, etc.

Is it possible to add Golden Gate Transit buses to the map?

How about a color change if it's on time or late?

MUNI buses, except perhaps first thing in the morning, are essentially never on time. You can't go by any published schedule (which I assume is why Google Maps predictions are essentially random numbers)--you have to go by the NextBus real-time data.

I don't think the concept of "on time" even exists for MUNI. The route may have a defined start and stop time, but that's it. Throughout the day you can get estimates of the average time between two busses on the same route, and I have to assume that data is used to manufacture published schedules, but the schedules don't actually represent anything real.

OK, how about within the normal "on time" window?

If you can see the bus from the bus stop, it will probably arrive soon.

Frankly, I'm not sure that's true. :)

You are correct. MUNI schedules are defined by bus frequency, not a timetable. Trains/Buses come every 10 min from 7-9am (for example), every 15 min. from 9-11am, etc.

So what data is Google Maps using for its predictions then? It's definitely not the same as nextmuni (at least last time I checked), and in fact seems much worse. I had always assumed there was a schedule and that Google was using it.

Either Google manufactured a schedule, or they're using someone else's manufactured schedule.

In some of the older bus stops there are approximate schedules. Before the stop near my apartment was removed it seemed to match the data on Google maps.

Google maps is much worse than nextmuni. It's one of the first things I was warned about when I moved here.

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