Transport for London – New responsive website | Hacker News Reader

Transport for London – New responsive website

tfl.gov.uk

79 pointsmcdowall55 comments

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This is really good.

To give an international perspective, this is what I was used to as a Dutch person:

http://9292.nl/

I didn't realise how great that website was until I moved to Sweden to study. This is what is available here:

http://www.reseplaneraren.skanetrafiken.se/querypage_adv.asp...

I've noticed that I used public transport on long distances a lot more when the website was a lot easier to use.

I have to agree on that, however I moved in the opposite way.

Back in Sweden I just found it easier to download the route maps of the cities and just manually follow the routes to determine the best place to get on/off or switch.

Also these travel planners that are available for Sweden (or at least 2000's) didn't really work well when you want to travel between cities.

9292ov.nl helped me out tons when I moved here, it still do, but mainly for trains these days. In the cities I just use the bicycle, as is customary around here :)

I heard it through the grapevine Skanetraffiken is looking for an interaction designer so... fingers crossed!

It really depends on where you are in Sweden. Different regions have different public transport providers.

Never thought I would defend Västtrafik(public transport in south west Sweden) but here I go.

Their webpage http://www.vasttrafik.se/ is quite usable. It finds good routes and you can fiddle around with different parameters such as times for changes etc. You can say that you are willing to walk or take a bike part of the way as well. Overall pretty good as long as you are on a computer.

On a phone the default app is not so good. Instead use ResOplanerare which has a very minimal and slick interface.

Perhaps the English link of the Dutch good-example site provides a better understanding: http://9292.nl/en# The Sweden site looks like it was made in 1990...

http://m.9292.nl/ The mobile version works well, no big images.

Still wishing they'll completely open up the data and end the 9292 monopoly. Recently a lot of Dutch public transport data has been opened up but you kinda need it all to make an effective 9292-alternative.

As a contractor, I was involved in development for the trip planner widget for Skånetrafiken. Markup was constructed from MSPainted jpeg blueprints. Where the designs came from, I have no idea.

This is the company that built the swedish travel planner, just check their site out: http://www.forslerostjerna.se/cm2f/default.asp

I know that they tried to recruit a 'creative pascal developer' about a year ago :)

Hm, "creative pascal developer" -- so they want Donald Knuth? ;-)

Looks fantastic! There is also an API and documentation available at http://api.tfl.gov.uk.

Disclaimer: I'm part of the combined TfL and BAE Systems Applied Intelligence team (née Detica) that did the build and architecture, along with the great folks at We Are Experience and Attenda.

Appreciate the namecheck, idlemind. Great team on the project.

(I'm part of we are experience)

Great work both of you - genuinely improving things for us Tfl users is appreciated!

Forgot to namecheck the TfL team though, oops! Fixed now. (Sorry guys!)

Is there an API for Oyster balances yet? (or planned?) I ask as someone slightly concerned by popular apps which seem to rely on you giving some third party your TFL login for them to scrape it for you...

Very happy to see that TFL have done as much as they have though. Lovely to see :)

Not yet, both myself and Tom Loosemoore (deputy director of Government Digital Services) have queried about this here - http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2014/03/12/why-a-new-website-but-no-a...

More information about 3rd party Oyster apps and TfL's upcoming mobile-friendly Oyster website here: http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2014/03/12/why-a-new-website-but-no-a...

Edit: ha, beat me to it alex :)

I love that there are aerospace engineers tasked with doing stuff for the folks who do underground trains :P

Most of us wouldn't know the back end of a plane from the front end of a tube train :)

Minor quibble - the "here" of "Request one here" is black text on a dark blue background and therefore invisible to me.

Another minor quibble - print the rules for passwords before people submit an invalid one. And if you do force a resubmit, persist all the form settings or you're going to annoy me^Wpeople.

The link is fixed in the next release. I will ask about the password rules - that does sound annoying.

It's been a long standing problem, it would definitely improve my life a significant amount! See also : suspending the access after 3 or however many incorrect attempts, but not telling you that's what's happened.

Great work, thanks for building useful, friendly government services. More of this please!

Nice job Timmy!

It's unclear what the duration at the right for each API call is. Rate limit? Information freshness?

From what I remember from the old API site, it is information freshness.

Yep, freshness or TTL in our cache layer.

The homepage loads with more than 108 KB of JavaScript. Why so many scripts?!

Having a fully responsive version means that users will navigate the site on mobile devices where data networks are not always good.

Do you intend to reduce the JavaScript payload?

It loads really fast on mobile. I live in London and use it constantly.

Hey, it loads fast on EE, can't ask for much more!

From the comments I'm trying to work out who you are, struggling tho!

It formats nicely on Mobile Safari but ...

1. "Welcome to our new site" wastes space. 2. The logo and menu bar wastes space. 3. "Tube, DLR and London Overground" wastes space.

Then I click on "Special service" for London Overground (the black text on dark orange is hard to read btw) and ... I get an entirely wasted page that tells me nothing about the Overground because the crap at the top has pushed the actual information I'm after under the fold.

cf http://bit.ly/1gJ64ri

Also, the "add any further feedback" text box has issues under Mobile Safari once you try and go back to edit text - I can't add any more text once I've deleted anything. If I close and open the feedback pane, I can type again. It's a bit confusing!

Minor quibbles really but I'd say it was only half responsive, not fully there.

Really appreciate the initiative. Need to point out a couple of things (using an Android phone):

Cannot do a search. The menu items are on top of it.

Cannot close the information box about cookies.

Overall, a very good initiative.

Looks good, website is more responsive than the existing one. Quick wins I've noticed on my 2min browsing: 1 Auto fill on the "to" and "from" boxes. 2 website looks clean and responsive 3 The future feature "avoid zone 1". Plenty of people are limited with the travel card deals and will enjoy this feature 4 "View on map", thank God I really didn't like having to download a pdf every time I wanted to check a trip

They had it on a subdomain for ages. Glad it's finally the main site. It's actually beautiful. Now if only they'd redesign the Oyster bit too.

TFL's comment on this - "To make it easier to use Oyster on your smartphone we will be launching a mobile-friendly version later this year."

http://blog.tfl.gov.uk/2014/03/12/why-a-new-website-but-no-a...

It's on the way. The beta was about for 9mths or so

This site is really nice to use.

Does anyone know where it gets data on walking routes?

There is a train station near where I used to live. Google Maps correctly identifies it as being 11 mins' away by foot. The TfL site thinks it's 23 mins away by bus, so never includes it in any suggested routes, instead showing my multiple-leg journeys by bus and tube.

Is there a place to report errors or 'I found a faster route'?

Can you send me a link to the journey planner results? There is no specific way to contribute improvements to the results, best way for now would be to leave feedback through the form in the title bar of the new website.

Edit: You also might get some mileage out of setting your walking speed to "Fast" and selecting "Routes with fewest changes"

Choosing 'fast walking' and 'routes with fewest changes' sort of worked, but it still shows a walking route which doesn't use the pedestrian-only bridge:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/plan-a-journey/results?IsAsync=true&Jp...

Even with the fast walking, they seem to have employed a slow walker to measure this. My walk to work I can do in 35 mins, which isn't at a terribly fast pace, but even TfL's fastest option reports it as taking 44mins http://www.tfl.gov.uk/plan-a-journey/results?IsAsync=true&Jp...

I don't know about now, but historically I've found TfL uses a slower walking speed than Google Maps.

Interesting to note that they minified the generated html. Other than that , well done just on face value

This is great, much better than what my city offers: http://www.mbta.com/ I really don't know how a company literally focused on their customers being "mobile" can't have a decent mobile website.

My main use case is checking what time the last tube home is, which I can't yet find.

On the old site, I could find the last tube out from Location to Middle Stop, but then get to Middle Stop and realise that the line from Middle Stop to Home is now shut. Hope they fix that now.

Developer Tip,http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tube-dlr-overground/status/ on this page is an SVG version of the tube map...

Surprised more people haven't noticed there's an SVG tube map right there! Bonus: it's tagged with the station Naptan codes and TransXChange route ids that are the API's currency.

This is pretty neat. We've had one[1] in Czech Rep. for a while but the UI is a little busy (and the adverts are a pain) so this TfL one is much nicer

[1] - http://idos.cz

plus the fact that the site refreshes at almost every click on the menu. If you have tabs, use them the right way! :)

doesn't disappoint on the title 'responsive', great!

off topic: this is the FIRST site I've seen that used Samsung mobile image to show the responsiveness of the page instead of an iPhone or an iPad

edit: the favicon is not right, when the page is not in focus, you'll see pieces of the white-background left (i have OCD)

http://i.imgur.com/z0LAmnJ.png

The hero image shows a lady using an iPhone. Where is the samsung image?

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/a-new-tfl-website/

Wonderful - must better than the old site and has what I want on the front page both on the desktop and my phone.

This is really great! So much more useful (and aesthetically pleasing) than their old site!

Wow, one of the best responsive designs I've seen.

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