Although I recently got a car, I still intend and sometimes prefer catching public transport to various places like uni or the city (mainly because I'm lazy and I like my grog
). Having needed to plan a multi-stop trip cross Melbourne recently (involved buses, trains and trams - eek! - probably should've driven if it weren't for my inexperience in navigating city roads), I began to ponder how all the timetable and service data that
Metlink has could be made better. Metlink, for my non-Victorian readers, is the umbrella name for our public transport system, covering buses, trains and trams.
Here are some ideas I came up with to bring the website's offerings up to speed with today's trends:
- Expose their journey planner and timetable data as an official XML web service and/or public API. With mashups all the craze at the moment, the possibilities are endless, and all ultimately good for Metlink (unless someone decides to compare the timetabled times to the actual times
- speaking of which they should make real-time data available for all services). Some examples include: - a mashup with Sensis' whereis.com.au service. If Metlink can convince them to offer a public transport route as an alternative to a car route this would be great for public transport as it promotes public transport as a viable alternative.
- a mobile based app that people can use to access journey planner and timetable data on the run, online and stored offline.
- widgets, gadgets etc. - see points below.
Currently the only way to do this is to either screen-scrape, or programatically parse the excel timetable downloads, both of which are tedious and inefficient.
- Fix the recently added mapping feature (which is really cool btw) so that you can just click one button and get detailed maps for the trip, and all the walks and stops in one go. Currently there's a 'leg map' for any walking distances, a 'stop map' for every stop and a zoomed-out map showing the entire trip.
For a simple trip, say from Glen Waverley Railway Station to Jeff's Shed, there are already 6 different maps for most routes. If I was completely oblivious, I'd have to click each one, wait for Acrobat Reader to load, click print, wait again, click back and repeat that all over again and end up with a heap of unlinked pages.
In fact, I reckon forcing people to view the map using PDF is bad. They should be able to view it as a web page (along with some nice Google Maps style stuff), then open the PDF if they want to print it.
- Create a timetable data widget for blogs, Yahoo! Widgets (formerley konfabulator), OSX's dashboard, Vista Sidebar etc. Metlink already allows you to store your favourite routes on it (the My Way feature), so it wouldn't be hard for it to extend that and store the user's preferred stops, and create widgets showing the next few times for the user's favourite routes and stops. Any service updates should be included too. Real-time data should be added as well, like data from Yarra Trams' TRAMTracker (link to Metlink article as Yarra Trams' site is experiencing a JSP issues right now). They should be doing this on their website anyway - as soon as a user logs into My Way, they should get all this on the front page.
Here's a mockup:
- Create a journey planner widget for all the various desktop widget platforms too. Apart from the various desktop widgets though, the killer feature would be a website widget. Imagine say, I'm organising an event at a bar somewhere, and I'm promoting this on a website. If I could put a widget on the location page with the destination, date and time pre-filled, all potential attendees have to do is enter their current location and they'll get a journey all planned out for them on the day. Taking it further, there could be a print button, or an SMS button so all the info is copied on to your phone.
Businesses, exhibitions, shopping centres, basically all brick-and-mortar places can use it too to facilitate their potential customers in finding them.
This functionality is not new - this idea however, simply makes it much easier for the user and goes a long way in dispersing the complexity associated with our public transport system.
Here's a possible mockup:
I just discovered that the idea of a website widget has been done by Transport Direct, UK's equivalent of Metlink. Check it out here. They have browser toolbars available too, though I'm not so sure about the viability of this, seeing as I have enough toolbars as it is in my browser; I don't need another one.
- As RSS is all the craze now, make all service updates and and news available via RSS. It should be able to provide feeds with service updates for all, a particular service, or all your favourite services.
- Create an overlay bookmarklet so the functions are available on any site at a click of a button. It should also take the highlighted text and put it in the address field.
In both of the widget mockups above, I've tried to use the Metlink site's styling as much as possible so the experience is expanded not just from their website, but to the user's desktop and other websites. For anyone who wants to turn the widgets into a reality, drop me a comment or an email and I'll make the graphic files available - they are just quick mockups I did using Fireworks though.
While I was doing some quick research for this article, I discovered that a lot of the transport systems worldwide already have widgets created by loyal fans, like for
the tube in the UK. I still can't find any who have released official widgets though. And I can't find any evidence that there are any public transport systems out there that have an official public API. Again many loyal fans have created
software that parse what they spit out, but as I said before, ultimately this is tedious, error-prone and inefficient. The closest to having machine-readable data available is the
VBB transport network in Europe, which offers an
offline app with regular updates (from the little bit of English that's available). RSS feeds containing service data are non-existent too. Please let me know if the facts above are wrong - I'd be interested to see any real-world examples (the only two public transport systems I'm familiar with are Melbourne's Metlink and Hong Kong's
MTR/
KCR).
While I was digging I managed to find the people who does the
journey planning software,
Mentz Datenverarbeitung GmBH (I'm not even gonna attempt to prenounce that). They have a large-ish user base, from Melbourne, to the UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Austria. There's no mention on their site about any sort of public API, so maybe its not a feature of their system. That said, the journey planner looks to be based on XSLT requests, meaning that the data is returned in XML format anyway so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to offer an XML web service technically. There also appears to be various attempts to link journey planners together with XML, like the
JourneyWeb project used in the UK. There's no evidence of a public-facing API from that though.
Come on Metlink, implement those features. It'll probably only appeal to nerds and early-adopters at first, but we're influential, and if we like it, we'll promote it - there's nothing like genuine person-to-person promotion. Put it this way - by providing widgets and a public API you're offloading a bit of the advertising work to us for nothing. Think of all the great apps we could make that allow others to access public transport better! Given that we're already behind in
smartcard ticketing, and the system is losing money by the bucketload, you've got nothing to lose and much to gain.