When’s the next bus at your nearest two stops ? How about the next 5 buses ?
Frankly unless its a regular route we don’t know, so we don’t use it, and we don’t care, so we drive.
If it was easier to find out, maybe we’d use it more, and their would be less congestion on the road… err so I can drive about quicker ;)
-Can we filter busesto exclude certain companies (i.e. stagecoach – and will their be any left after ? Maybe we should say 0 buses, but 5 filtered..reveal?)
-Maybe we show the bus stops nearest to you… 5 of them maybe ? Why not make the number configurable in your user profile, where you’d also have your ‘regular’ routes / stops / times & direction of travel / your regular places (home/office/pub) ?
-Why not overlay this information as a popup layer from the bus stop icon on the map ?
-Maybe to start the whole thing off you just click on two places on a map, instead of all this existing entering street names and
Information / API’s involved:
-Bus times : Department of Transport, GMPTE/A, Bus Companies
-Bus Node Db : I have the Manchester one from the DoT (avail for non-commercial usages)
-Maps: Google ? Open Street Map ? Multimap ? Yahoo ?
Reference Web Sites:
-http://nw.aim…. (shh don’t mention the A_tos O_rigin developed one!!I’ll cry as they’re proper nasty peeps!)
Bus Comanies: -Finglands -First -Bullocks
Extensions: -Bus on time ? ... maybe user updated timetable if a journey is regurarly late / early ? (Though maybe they’re just on the wrong instance of that route ?)
Objects:
BusCompany{Name,(Routes)} BusStop{Lat,Long,(Routes), Direction} BusRoute{Number,PtAPtB,[[x1,y1,t1],..,[x99,y99,t99]]} t=time, x=lat,y=long
User{name,pwd,email} Profile{PreferedRoutes, PreferedStops, [TravelTime,Direction], HomePostcode, WorkPostcode }
Routines:
routes[]=Search.findAllRoutes(bustop) services[]=Search.findNext5Services(routes[],bustop)
Questions:
How do you encapsulate the Route in words ? i.e. “Bus Travels along Palentine Road, Joining Wilmslow Rd, which turns into Oxford Rd,...., reaches Picadilly” – Maybe that should be an extension ?
Added by Ian Moss 10 months ago, last updated 6 months ago by Gemma Cameron
Comments
Talk to the guys who write Metro for the PocketPC and Palm platform. They already have a pretty good algorithm for getting routing information together, and that software is freeware. It appears that the bulk of the problem is more about getting the data together, rather than getting something like it to work.
Could be interesting?
http://www.wymetro.com/yournextbus/Howdoiuseyournextbus.htm
is good but it assumes that buses run on schedule. Getting real live bus times would be really good :
“SMS me when there’s a number 10 5 minutes away from stop X”
Oh – real times are available !
http://www.wymetro.com/yournextbus/Whatdoesmyreturnedmessagemean.htm
says
Real times are shown in minutes (e.g. “3 mins”)
as opposed to 24 hour clock format.
/... thinks …/
You can see it in action on their website, but it makes the most heinous use of frames you’ve ever seen.
http://www.travelsouthyorkshire.com/your_travel/buses/YourNextBus+Introduction.htm
That’s if you can navigate to it in the first place.
But only some of the busses provide realtime information, others don’t, it works on the bus too, not the route, and until you get the message back you don’t know if it’s going to be live data or just a copy of what’s on the timetable in front of you. Each mesage costs 20p on top of your standard rate too.
By coincidence I emailed SYPTE about this very thing yesterday.