Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinting | Hacker News Reader

Hi, founder here. Throw any questions you have my way.

I know you're just getting started with a lot of this, but how much planning are you doing with counterintitive transit issues, like bus holdovers at major transit centers? There are a lot of frustrations of busses scheduled to drop off or pick up passengers at stations, but with no layover to do both duties. This naturally leads to rather grumpy transit riders. Is your application going to be set up to handle situations like that?

Those are called pulse points. There's some great background here: http://www.humantransit.org/2010/12/basics-finding-your-puls...

Today, planners use some scary excel sheets to try to figure this out. They are scary enough that most don't.

Definitely on our list of things to tackle.

Interesting article, and I can just imagine the scariness of figuring out the pulse points of the various Bay Area transit hubs and agencies (aside: can we please get like half of the agencies to just go ahead and merge already, interagency transfers are the worst) using tools like massive excel sheets and the like. Anyways, best of luck in incorporating all this info.

Does your product do any modeling, or is it basically TSP with an optimum function of visiting as many people and job hotspots in as short an amount of time as possible (with customisable boundary conditions, of course)? I'm very critical of the article's claim that this is somehow novel, but I guess it depends on how you define 'this'.

We're keeping it simple for now. Complex modeling comes later. :)

This seems like an amazing tool for transit agencies, nice job.

I saw a screenshot of one of the CapMetro routes in Austin on your homepage. Have you been working with CapMetro recently?

Thanks. We're trying to. We're actually visiting CapMetro in mid-March while we're in town for SXSW (specifically meeting with their Planning and Community Involvement teams). Would you have any recommendations?

I don't have any novel suggestions regarding routes, the new MetroRapid routes have fit my needs pretty well (as a student). But like most people, I'm in favor of extending the late-night hours Thursday through Saturday nights.

Some friends and I have been working on a web app[0] to make it easier to see where the buses and trains are in real-time, and ideally get more people to ride them. We've been emailing CapMetro a lot to resolve issues with the GTFS data and the new GTFS-RT API and they're pretty responsive.

We'll be at Interactive so hopefully we can chat for a bit.

[0]: https://github.com/luqmaan/Instabus

Reply on news.ycombinator.com