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Automotive People-Mover Timetables For The Public On Your Portable Telephoning Device? It Sounds Like The Future!
You know what’s awesome? People on the internet who love the TTC. Torontoist is already firmly on board with the freelance public transit love, so it seemed only appropriate to alert the masses to another project in no way affiliated with the TTC that seeks to improve it.
gottc.ca doesn’t look like much when you open it in a normal browser, and it isn’t supposed to. That’s because it’s been written as simply and sparsely as possible to do one thing: give you access to TTC bus schedules on your cell phone using a minimum of bandwidth to do so. The main page (the site’s author only has the first half of the alphabet’s routes up thus far, but promises that the remainder will be up by the end of this week) is designed to get you to your schedule of choice in “14 Kb or less” of bandwidth – which, given cellphone browsing costs, is far from insignificant.
The site’s author also shows how the TTC could make cellphone schedule browsing even more convenient with his example of a cell-friendly schedule for the 5 Avenue Road North bus. Torontoist tested it out and, wow, that’s incredibly convenient for cell browsing. Says the author:
I would like to deliver the rest of the schedules in the 5 N Avenue format, but at the moment I don’t have the skills to write the CGI or whatever would be necessary to automate the process. I would certainly love it if someone came forward. The site is free and always will be – perhaps that will attract someone to donate some of their time and help out.
He adds a little editorial flair with this comment:
My take on the TTC debacle is that the TTC should stick to a few basic objectives: an open-source trip planner that websites like mine could integrate with and 2) putting more languages on their website. Anything more and they will lose focus.
However, just in case the TTC isn’t happy with this free-web project, the designer has pre-emptively set up a webpage where a donation button can go in case he gets sued.