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news

TTC’s Trip Planner Officially Online, in “Beta”

By David Topping

201002tripplanner.jpg
The TTC’s trip planner is now online, officially, a little over a week after an early version of it first appeared online—a version which we used extensively and concluded wasn’t ready for the public.
We’ve been told, however, that the version now online, accessible from the TTC’s home page or on its own dedicated page, has been tweaked, and that it will presumably work better. It certainly looks the same, and we’re messing around with it now, but the best way to find out if this thing works? Critical mass. So go forth, readers: use it, and then tell us what you think in the comments here. You can also tell the TTC directly and privately, but where’s the fun?

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  • http://undefined TK

    The trip planner is erratic at best. I tried getting a trip planned from my home in Corso Italia to my office in the Financial District.
    The first route it gave me worked (Dufferin Bus->BD Subway->YUS Subway). Then I asked for a route without bus (to see if it would recommend the St. Clair Street Car). Same as before (ie. gave me a route with buses).
    Now, it’s giving me the message “We could not find any connections between the origin (starting point) of your trip and the destination (ending point) of your trip”, after I tried reloading the page and starting from scratch.
    Interesting idea, bad execution.

  • http://undefined daughter of the non light

    I’d rather walk to the nearest shelter in the dead of winter to see a map than wait around for this thing to load and tell me there’s no matching route.

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    Lots of feedback on it from our Twitter followers, good and bad—most of it collected here.
    Some stuff so far:
    “Put in home to work and it added 10 minutes and a useless bus trip to my commute. Doesn’t do well with 1way streets and walking.”—@deadfashionista
    “It told me to take the 97 Yonge instead of the subway to get from Queen to Bloor. That should never happen between stations.”—@jchristidis
    “Got directions from Queen/Dufferin to Queen/Sherbourne. It said to take the 504 King car.”—@criminaltoronto
    “Just tried it out, and it actually worked beautifully. There aren’t words to express my shock at this!”—@thetelevixen
    “From St. Clair West to York Mills and Leslie, 3 buses? in rush hour? I like to use that underground rail thingy.”—@astoutley
    “keeps telling me to get off at the next stop and walk back to the one I wanted. Maybe the TTC is just encouraging exercise?”—@gregleaver
    “Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but here’s what the TTC’s Trip Planner looks like on iPhone http://twitpic.com/112hc8 “—@AdamSchwabe
    “The good: I got directions from the nearest major intersection to my church. The bad: express buses seem to have been left out.”—@TsarKasim

  • David Toronto

    I tried my old address in Swansea area and my father’s
    office in Mimico.
    Two tries and not able to provide information.
    The second time round it asked me for intersections
    instead of addresses.
    Oh well, it’s early days yet.

  • crickhopper

    I tried submitting an exact street address in Leslieville to an exact street address on the Danforth (about a 30 minute walk). Directions to take the Jones bus were fine, about a 7 minute trip. Tried the same thing using the nearest intersections instead of exact street addresses, and the trip planner took me west on Queen to Yonge station by streetcar, north on Yonge to Eglinton by subway, east on Eglinton by bus and all the way south to the Danforth by bus! 74 minutes! Ah, lol.

  • http://undefined Daniel

    Hmm. Basically broken, but it is a Beta. The TTC’s website slowly lurching toward 2003 (which is better than 2 years ago, when it was stuck in 1998).
    Still don’t get why they couldn’t have just used a Google Map integration (seems fairly shameful that pretty much every city in Canada has Transit on Google maps except for Toronto).

  • http://undefined leftist

    What a steaming pile of horse shit! We waited two years for this?
    Here’s a screenshot of how I should go from Yonge and Bloor to Queen and Spadina.
    If Adam wants my mayoral vote, he’ll scrap this failure and figure out how to get on board with the folks being MyTTC, pronto.

  • http://undefined Usus

    I tried a bunch of different routes and it seems to do better at long routes than short ones. It also seems to have a bias against subway routes.

  • http://undefined jw03

    If you select Bloor/Yonge Station from the dropdown list of suggestions, on the next step it asks to “check your addresses” and says the best match is “BLOORDALE PARK, BURNHAMTHORPE RD, ETOBICOKE” with “BLOOR/YONGE STATION, BLOOR ST E, CITY OF TORONTO” as the very last of the list of the suggestions on the right.

  • Will.Jackson

    Worked fine on my laptop for an admittedly simple trip – but had some formatting troubles on my iphone which made it harder, though not impossible, to use. Would be nice to see a mobile version in the future, but all in all, its its gets a passing grade.

  • http://undefined David Toronto

    That bit about King Street East can throw a person
    for a loop. They mean, of course, the north side of
    King at the westbound street car stop.
    The Asquith Ave. bit probably has something to do
    with the actual path of the subway under the street.
    It isn’t under Bloor St., but is about 35 metres
    north.
    I had frustrations. Please see number 4 above.

  • http://undefined Brian

    Worked fine enough for me. There was mention that Google Transit integration is coming in June (?) Once that happens it will work fine on my iPhone…

  • http://torontoist.is.not.nickwarzin.com/blog tapesonthefloor

    The planner took you to King because it calculated the King car being ready for you to hop on before the Queen car. In a perfect world, this might occasionally even be true. In reality, the King car is obviously never the right choice.
    I feel that using schedules that routes never adhere to anyway is a terrible way to calculate trips. I also find the address matching could be more robust (i.e., when I entered “29 Galley Ave, Toronto, ON” it asked me if I actually meant “29 Galley Ave, Toronto, ON” because apparently there was a chance I may not have), and I say that as someone who makes a living building precisely this sort of application.

  • http://undefined EricSmith

    It suggested that I take the streetcar up Roncesvalles for one trip that I tried — before they get out of beta, they should find a way to represent the fact that it’s a bus these days, lest people expect it to be a streetcar, as the little icon in the itinerary advertises. At least they show the diverted route southbound, so you won’t be left standing on currently one-way Roncesvalles wondering where your southbound trip is.

    There’s another unpolished aspect: routes aren’t named perfectly consistently. It’s “506 High Park,” but “504 King S.C.” (for streetcar, I guess, but a) why bother and b) why only sometimes?)

    An annoyance: if you bring the planner up and then get distracted for a few minutes, or just type too slowly, the automatically selected date and time will end up being in the past. That doesn’t bother me, but it bothers the planner, which squawks “Please select a time after the current time.” Dreadful even if I didn’t want to check a schedule from earlier in the day.

    Something that OC Transpo, in all of its Web 1.0 glory, gets right and this tool doesn’t: given a route suggestion, you should be able to ask for earlier or later departures, or tweak planning preferences. OC Transpo lets you ask for “least walking,” or “fewest transfers,” for instance, and see how that influences the planned route. Actually, the OC Transpo planner’s ability to remember your recently chosen destinations is another point in its favour over the TTC beta.

    Also: MyTTC (which hasn’t caught on to the lack of southbound service on Roncesvalles) encodes your query in the URL of the resulting page, so you can just give it to others as a link or bookmark it. So nice. The official planner should be as good with its URLs.

  • http://undefined leftist

    Or, you know… maybe it should be the official planner.

  • http://undefined james a

    The fact that they are building this at all instead of just focusing on Google Transit in the first place seems like a waste of time/money to me.
    That said, the implementation is certainly very nice. I really like the auto-suggestions in the from and to boxes and the fact you can choose which modes of transport you want.

  • http://undefined thewatchmaker

    I just tried two long trips that I take with some frequency, each cutting across long swathes of the city. The results were great each time – the first (from my home in the east end to my workplace at York U) is exactly the route that I take, while the second (from home to my brother’s home in the west end) actually suggested a subtle difference that, when I stopped to consider it, made a lot of sense – going one stop further east in order to take advantage of a bus route that runs with greater frequency.
    So my admittedly brief test comes back with a perfect score for the trip planner.

  • http://undefined panko

    Erratic and mediocre at best. It does not recognize streets in the Annex, for example. I tried a few streets betweem Bloor and Spadina and none were picked up. If I picked Spadina and Bloor, then I got something. Then, however, “St. George” (I thought it would be recognized as a station, i.e. landmark) instead generated a country club in Etobicoke.
    Why reinvent the wheel, TTC? WHY????

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    You should try asking the MyTTC folks if they’d do the City, and us, the outstanding service of releasing their source so the city can adopt it.
    Or, ask the TTC if it has made the same request.
    I’d be curious to hear either answer.

  • http://undefined andrews

    I wanted to get from College Stn to St Clair W station. It had me walk up to Wellesley and take the 94 across to Museum stn, then go north. Strange. That transfer is allowed but isn’t particularly convenient, and not at all the other way. It seems to optimize to within seconds based on schedules – if it takes 8 mins to walk and catch the 94, but the 506 isn’t due for 15, you walk. No sign of “walk to Queens Park”, “506″ or “512″, the obvious solutions. Of course, we all know how realistic TTC schedules are.
    The YUS loop seems to confuse it, particularly riding “round the loop” or YUS-BD-YUS Z-transfers. These paths are not particularly logical or obvious unless you regularly use the system. (Backtracking? An extra transfer to avoid a surface route?) I don’t think its programmers really adequately weighted passenger psychology.
    Think of it as a game. Every move has a cost. The subway is cheap, walking or transfers between infrequent buses is expensive. Although they won’t ever factor this in, waiting for a late vehicle on an erratic surface route is extremely expensive. They need to tweak those values. Not an easy task, as the “average” rider changes over the course of the day and the seasons, but they can certainly improve what they have now.

  • http://undefined EricSmith

    I planned another route and came up with some more improvements. As I wrote to the TTC on their comments form:

    Sometimes the route name includes confusing or unnecessary detail: planning a trip from 60 Kilpatrick Drive to Ryerson University, I’m told to take “68 WARDEN TO WARDEN STN EXTRA FARE REQUIRED NORTH OF STEELES”. At no point will I be north of Steeles.
    The Itinerary Summary is confusing, partly because of the route names. For that same trip from Scarborough to downtown, it looks like I’m being told to:—

    1. take the 68 Warden to Warden Station,
    2. then the Bloor-Danforth subway to Kipling Station,
    3. then an impossible transfer to Y-U-S, which I should ride to Downsview Station, but then
    4. get off at … Dundas?

    This is because the subways I’m supposed to catch are named things like “BLOOR-DANFORTH TO KIPLING”. To fix this, you should use “eastbound” and “westbound” for subway routes, just like the signs in the stations. You should also name the intermediate transfer stations, so that I know whether to transfer from B-D to Y-U-S at Yonge or St. George.

    Hitting the red “View the details of this trip” button gets you a less confusing itinerary, but the summary is still bad. As it is, especially when it comes to the subway, the summary is realy only useful to you if you already know the system.

  • http://undefined torontothegreat

    Google Maps are not accessible. Period.
    The somewhat hidden (make the maps slightly more accessible) feature http://maps.google.com/output=html doesn’t include walking/transit, only driving.