For the moment, a stub, i.e. no implementation yet, but an explanation
and some examples of what I plan.
Eventually this will provide public-transit schedules,
and automated trip planner,
formatted to work well on cell-phones with 1-inch screens.
I'll start with Santa Clara County VTA (Valley Transit Authority)
whose WebSite VTA.org
works crappily but occasionally usably on
VT100 screen such as lynx, and is totally unsuitable for cell-phones.
Later I might include the rest of the San Francisco bay area,
and eventually other public-transit regions that have route data
available online.
I currently imagine the user interface to work something like this:
First select route number, for example 26.
It shows you the two endpoints by full name:
Eastridge Transit Center <-> Sunnyvale / Lockheed Martin Transit Center
It gives you options:
Direction [Eas->Sun | *Sun->Eas*]
[*Weekday* | Saturday | Sunday/Holiday]
Hour of day: [5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 *10* 11]
Timed stops: [ ] Eastridge / [ ] Curtner&Monterey / [ ] Curtner LRT Station /
... / [X] Wolf & Stevens Creek / [X] Wolf & El Camino /
[X] Fair Oaks & Tasman / [ ] Lockheed Martin Transit Center
[SHOW TIMES] (click on that link)
FaiTa WolEl WolSt
9:55 10:07 10:15
I can see at a glance that since it's already after 10PM and I still
need to bike to Fair Oaks at Evelyn, which is about halfway between
FaiTa and AolEL timestops, I'm already too late to catch that last run
of the night, so I need to try a different route instead. Suppose
I select bus route 22, from El Camino and Sunnyvale Avenue (between Hollenbeck
and Wolfe) to Lawrence expressway (between Wolfe and Kiely):
ElHol ElWol ElKie
9:52 10:00 10:08
10:12 10:20 10:28
10:32 10:40 10:48
I can see that I've missed the 9:52 run, might just barely be able to
catch the 10:12, and can use 10:32 as backup. In fact I missed the
10:12 by 3 minutes and had to wait 17 minutes longer for the backup.
Leaving my home at 10:05, bicycling to El Camino, taking 22, bicycling
up shoulder of Lawrence Expressway (no bike lane), I arrived at the
EMERGENCY ROOM at 11:00. But if I hadn't needed to spend a half hour
looking up those timestops manually with printed schedules, if I had
this cell-phone bus-schedule service already, it would have taken
only 3 minutes to get both routes, and I would have left earlier
and caught an earlier bus.
After I have the single-route single-time-range as above working,
I would add a new feature: Generate 26 timestops as above, bookmark that,
generate 22 timestops as above, bookmark that, select both to display
together on single 8-line 24-char-wide 1-inch cellphone screen:
FaiTa WolEl WolSt
9:55 10:07 10:15
ElHol ElWol ElKie
9:52 10:00 10:08
10:12 10:20 10:28
10:32 10:40 10:48
with two lines to spare!!
.
Update 2010.May.02: During that last week before some of the schedules
change (4 times per year, first week of Jan/Apr/Jul/Oct), if I can get
new/changed schedules online before they go into effect, I'll compare old
and new, and where they differ I'll keep both old
and new in my database, offer extra
option [(*) before ( ) onOrAfter] the date the new times go into effect.
But if I can't get new schedules online until the morning they go into effect,
I'll just issue warning the last week that times I show might become
invalid on such-and-such date.
.
If you like this idea, and want it implemented any time soon, please vote
for it: Portl1 -> temporary link
-> [create account, if not already done]
-> log in -> [missing-word question, if you don't yet have 6+ seconds
credit on your account]
-> Surveys -> Meta-survey -> Features -> VTAorg.