Disgruntled Star Editor Takes Constructive Revenge
Drop Fees, End Poverty! And Also Do All These Other Things!
Kensington Market's Business, Soon to be Improved
Live Green Toronto's Bright Idea
Stacks of Tracks (in the Stacks)
The TTC has a new website: MyTTC.ca! It's got a functional trip planner, a stats section with the neat map/video above ("each burst represents a bus departing from the stop in that location"), pages for each route that can be edited by the site's users, more features like SMS/IM integration and an interface designed for smart phones and PDAs coming soon, and is—surprise—not affiliated with the transit organization in any way, shape, or form.
Instead, it's the work of developers Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan, who met at TransitCamp in 2007 and who created the site "out of a desire for free, open access to transit data." Doing so required completely rebuilding the TTC's service data to make it "coherent," but their hard work now means that other developers can work with the foundation they've set to create their own projects or to improve on MyTTC however they see fit. (That's not easily the case for the TTC's own website, which will eventually include a trip planner of its own.)
Thankfully, it's not only developers who benefit from MyTTC's open approach to transit. Take the site's crown jewel, its trip planner. Give it a departure point, destination, and any time of any day, and it'll speedily chart the fastest possible course, step-by-step. Click on any route it offers, and you'll be taken to a page anyone can edit that contains what Huggins calls "fringe information," the kind of stuff that the TTC can't or won't tell you—which routes don't run according to schedule, where to wait for a bus or streetcar on a cold winter's day, and so on. "There's a wealth of other information," says Huggins, "that riders both want and collectively have about how the service integrates with their lives that I think is extremely valuable." That user-generated content—the more the better—is what Huggins and Branigan see as the primary difference in focus between their site and the TTC's own: "I'm convinced," says Huggins, "that the quality of our experience as riders of the system could only get better with more information."
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
How many days until TTC lawyers send a cease & desist letter?
I tested it and got directions that I wouldn't have considered, maybe I've been taking a route that took longer than necessary?
I'll bookmark it for sure.
Awesome idea and a really cool tool.. But somehow I don't think it's ready for primetime yet.
It's suggestion for getting from Dundas West stn to York ignores the Spadina subway in favour of the Yonge line, then suggests walking for the last 20 minutes of the trip. :)
Travel times seem to be seriously flawed - for my test anyway. But great to see this happening. I'm looking forward to future versions!
I had a similar experience. Here it is at:
http://myttc.ca/travel/from/444_Yonge_St/to/94_Montgomery_Rd
and I have to wonder why it didn't recommend the
subway up Yonge and then along Bloor.
Why the fixation with surface routes?
Let's be fair, it's early days yet.
-----------
By the way this is the second time I asked for the routing and the first was still streetcar obsessed.
Maybe a little fine tuning will fix things up.
I just went back on the link I provided and now I have yet another route and this one takes me downtown and up the University line to Bloor subway.
Beats me why it's acting up like this.
Why not try inputting the same information at different times to see if the route changes.
Interesting blank areas in that animation, like the Queensway west of Humber Loop which is rapidly intensifying (and would be ideal to put an LRT through)
Even in Beta, far, far more useful than the TTC site. The "new" TTC site beta we reviewed a couple of months ago is like a first-year college student project.
Let me blow your mind. Go to this link and for example put "Kagurazaka" in the first field and "Shinjuku" in the second field.
http://transit.yahoo.co.jp/
Hit Return and it will select the most likely kanji characters for you. This is from my home station to the busiest station in the world. Scroll down a little and click the button in the middle to get your route search results.
The result is 3 alternate routes. The first route shows in green lettering the variable cost as 290 yen (plus the 1,3, and 6 month pass prices for this route), duration 16 minutes (11 minutes on the train and 5 minutes waiting on platforms and walking), and transfers as one (distance of 5.6 km).
But wait, there's more ....
Each leg of the trip shows the exact schedule of departure and arrival at each station on the far left. These trains WILL NOT BE LATE.
And, there are 6 useful links embedded next to each station name in the route:
1. a list of landmarks and destinations outside each numbered exit
2. a Yahoo! map of the neighbourhood around the station
3. hotels and other domestic travel amenities
4. on-line discount coupons for shops and restaurants around the station
5. based on radius around the station, shops by price, genre, and so on
6. part-time jobs available in the area (with pictures of staff on some icons)
With the alleged power of the internet and modern computers, there is no limit to what can be offered to users. Uhhhh, perhaps only limited by the limited imaginations of the TTC managers in charge of their website.
For more fun, check out the Japan Yahoo! maps. My apartment is about here:
http://map.yahoo.co.jp/pl?type=scroll&lat=35.69495997&lon=139.73425873&sc=5&mode=map&pointer=on
In the left column, the first item are all stations in walking distance. Click on the link with the red chevrons (>>) and it will expand to show you the 3 stations. The 1st station is a 7 minute walk (Exit A1), the 2nd is 8 minutes (East Exit) and the 3rd is 12 minutes (Exit 2).
The red button with 360 printed within will pop up a panoramic photo of the station exit at street level. The options are endless .....
Oh my God, and I just discovered that teh first link next to the number 1,2, or 3 which I thought was just the station name is actually something more. It maps the walking path and calculates how many metres it is and estimates the time needed! Cool!
Thanks for the comments! I've compiled a list of common trip planner questions here:
http://myttc.ca/trip_planner_faq
If, however, that doesn't answer your questions please feel free to get in touch via the feedback form - we'll actually respond :-)
Cheers,
Kieran
Yeah, everyone knows the Asian transit system is amazing... the most irritating thing is when North Americans expats over there go on and on and on about it... (and on and on and onnnnnnnnnn)...
What I want to know is who did the awesome background music.
It's really cool, but at present the trip planner doesn't seem to abide by the rules for a use of a transfer..
For example, I don't think you're allowed to do this with a transfer. (47 Lansdowne to Dundas, 505 Dundas to Dundas West Stn., subway to Runnymede station)
The rules demand the "most direct route by # of transfers" event if not the fastest; That's three transfers when you could have done it with just two (47 Lansdowne to Bloor, subway to Runnymede), so technically, following some of these directions could get you called on the carpet by an operator.
@teeg: it's Mark Mothersbaugh, off The Life Aquatic soundtrack.
The page seems to give some pretty wacky suggestions for bus trips, like taking two buses to a subway station, instead of one bus to a closer station.
hmmm. Directions for an August Saturday afternoon trip from Jarvis and Front to the Exhibition:
http://myttc.ca/travel/from/Jarvis_and_Front/to/15_Saskatchewan/at/12:00pm/on/august_23
Directions
Walk from Jarvis and Front
Arrive at 15 Saskatchewan
No transit directions are required for this trip. Sometimes it's faster to walk!
Faster to walk 5.5 km?!
The trip planner is wacky. It would add 20 minutes to a 25-minute trip I take all the time, and tells me it would take less than it currently does. If the official TTC site ever gave directions like that, there would be a big public outcry, tons of complaints, and the TTC would be forced to shut it down immediately. Torontoist would be the first to go after it for incompetence.
I was told the TTC is taking a long time to do its own trip planner because of the programming required and the work needed to make it real-time with the GPS on its vehicles. Seeing this trip planner, I understand why. This one will inconvenience a lot of people, and I hope to god no one who doesn't know better actually uses it, hoping to get somewhere efficiently and with an accurate estimate of the time it will take to get there.
the trip planner is definitely not perfect but i've bookmarked it and will use it with a grain of salt.
tell it to plan a trip from hell to heaven and it'll give you directions out of scarborough and into etobicoke lol.
Anti-boy, I go on and on about it, but with facts,links, and suggestions. I do it in the hope of getting the TTC and Torontonians to aim higher. I do it to show that we need not reinvent the wheel.
If you are not interested in comments about transit overseas, just skip my post. Or better yet, offer something useful in your own comment. Don't just tell me to shut up in a backhanded way.