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… do the transit mash.
MetroRiderLA linked to Better Trolley, a tres cool web site with an interactive flash map of the San Diego Trolley system, and was especially impressed by the pinpointed stations linked to an interactive map. Upon further research, we discovered similar features for other big-city transit systems.
Google Maps Mania, a blog that tracks mash-ups using Google Maps, has a list of interesting transit mash-up maps around the world.
There’s no such service available for Southern California, yet. Although, Google Transit has rudimentary trip planners for Burbank Bus and Orange County Transportation Authority services.
Discussion
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Please keep discussions civil: exercise Troll Controll.
Dare I say MetroRiderLA tries to fill the void? Eeeek.
Google was looking for cities to apply to get this service (that’s why Burbank and OCTA are there). That doesn’t mean Metro did or did not apply. I know for a fact that Santa Clarita Transit applied, but apparently they did not make the cut for the beta test:)
I have a feeling something like this will come along, but google maps are fun to make and I encourage you guys to do it!
Hi everyone! My name is Robert, and I created BetterTrolley.com. I really appreciate your link, and hope you find the site helpful, as I find yours!
With specific regard to the Google Maps mashup, it’s become (perhaps unintentionally) the most popular part of the site. I originally designed the Flash map on the homepage of my site myself, but soon realized that there was indeed a void for a “real” map that shows the “real” locations of the track and stations.
Google Earth — another great resource for transit maps, believe it or not — had a map drawn for the San Diego Trolley, but the information was ca. 1997, and (in places) was woefully inaccurate and incomplete. I’m not sure if LA’s Google Earth maps suffer the same symptoms (because of my unfamiliarity with the system).
Compared to, say, LA’s Red Line, creating a map for the Trolley is easy. 95 percent of the track is above-ground, which means it’s just a (mind-numbingly tedious) task of tracing the track and pinpointing the stations. It was slightly more complicated with our Green line, because the satellite photos were taken before the line was complete. (I learned early on to follow the clusters of work trucks!)
Google Transit is great — and something I investigated participating in as well. The data that Google Transit requires first and foremost is a timetable for every station on every line. (Better yet, equip your rolling stock with GPS.) San Diego Trolley had neither. San Diego MTS used software that had time-points for key stations along the route, but made “guesses” based on distance for stations in-between. The argument could be made that someone could sit with the trip-planning utility on MTS’s website and generate such a table, but I have a day job and a girlfriend.
I think sites like this, sites on Google Maps Mania (and BetterTrolley) are the start of a new indie-transit movement that takes information away from stodgy government bureaucracy, and into the hands of riders. It’s a great democratizer, this Intarwebs thing.
Thanks all very much, and Happy Thursday!
Robert, thanks for the info! I stumbled upon your site last week and was very impressed, especially when I found out it was created by one guy who wasn’t even on the payroll of San Diego transit. Very inspirational! And I agree, sites like yours and this one are bringing on a sea-change in transit… proving to the bureaucrats that if they don’t work to improve the system, we will goddamnit!
Great work, love everything about “Better Trolley”… especially the design, it’s damn pretty.
indeed, i hung out at your site for some time yesterday in awe. really good design and of course the functionality is great. i’m now trying to figure out a weekend to go to san diego just so i can use your site. keep it up!
Robert, thanks for participating on our site. Good to know we have friends in San Diego.
Personally, there is a lot I love about San Diego’s transit. For one thing, the transit-oriented-development is just truly amazing. Even in North County, the bus stations either have stores or are situated near shopping centers. And, it’s great that the Green Line is able to string together three shopping malls. I’m also glad that San Diego Transit realized it was bus-poor and added more 15 minute service and limited-stop routes.
Anyway, if you want to get more comprehensive timetable information, the best thing to do is make friends with someone in transit operations, such as a bus driver or run cutter.
Internally, bus drivers follow what is called a “paddle”. The origin of the name comes from the streetcar days, where such route assignments were attached to wooden paddles, but it’s a piece of paper now. Anyway, the paddle is different because a normal public schedule contains a few major stops, whereas a paddle will have more stops schedules, up to half of the major stops on a route. The paddle also contains instructions on how to deadhead (go between the bus yard and the line out of service on a specific route), where to lay over, what special fares to collect, etc.
Getting a paddle would be useful for inputting the hidden schedules.
What would be even more useful, especially for rail, would be to do what MARTA (Atlanta) does. On its rail schedules, it has maps that show how long travel time between stations is, as well as the travel time between a station and the Five Points hub. Look at the pages for the North/South and East/West lines.
Thanks, Wad … those are all excellent suggestions. I’ve seen discarded paddles in the driver’s cab full of good information like this. Too bad they keep the drivers’ cabs locked.
This is all reminding me a long conversation I’ve had with myself (usually while I run in the morning) about how to improve BetterTrolley.
Since BetterTrolley is an independent site, my relationship with San Diego MTS is essentially nonexistent. It’s clear I need to do the legwork to find out the information I need to make a replacement trip-planning system myself (with Google Transit or otherwise).
In the absence of a MARTA-like map with distance calculations (MTS has similar maps at most stops, but calculates times — again — only between key stations) I could spend a Saturday with a clipboard and a stopwatch and figure it out for myself, too.
The underlying caveat with all this, of course, is that it’s still a timetable. It doesn’t reflect current line conditions, delays, and special events. (These are things that BetterTrolley was created for in the first place, since MTS’s own online rider alerting system is … horrific, really.) Saying a train is scheduled to arrive at 5:45 doesn’t mean it _will_ arrive.
This is where systems like those used on London’s Underground truly outclass us. Lighted message signs with next-train information and rider alerts; information by text message; information online and even through Mac OS X desktop widgets. This is a truly connected and informative system, but one that there just isn’t a budget for here.
MTS _could_, in theory, connect track-to-wayside telemetry data to the Internet, and it would work pretty well. (Not quite as precise as GPS, but better than what we have!) Some trains have on-board LCD screens that read this data, so it’s certainly possible. But that’s something MTS would have to set up.
Of course, I could install GPS transceivers on each train, which is only slightly outside my budget. Plus, me sneaking into the train yard at night installing black boxes on trains would surely entitle me to a visit from the Homeland Security Department.
But then, and only then, would San Diego Trolley riders have an accurate picture of where all the trains are, how long it will be until the next train arrives, and how long it will take to get to your destination. Everything up to that point is guesswork.
Since BetterTrolley is an independent site, my relationship with San Diego MTS is essentially nonexistent. It’s clear I need to do the legwork to find out the information I need to make a replacement trip-planning system myself (with Google Transit or otherwise).
Don’t focus too much on building a trip-planning software. Those would be such a pain to operate every shake-up (the periods when a transit system makes routing and schedule changes), and the agency can input the schedule changes before they’re released to the public.
It’s better to have a bulletin board to have the public answer the questions.
If you need the raw scheduling data, make a connection with someone in the scheduling building. They could give you a datafile with scheduling points. This is much easier since scheduling software has a widely used application known as Hastus. It allows for data to be exported in several formats.
One improvement I’d like to see in Better Trolley is connecting bus services at the stations. Would that be hard to add?
As it is now, BetterTrolley shows stations which stations have connecting bus routes. It doesn’t show specifically _which_ routes connect, because I think that it’s outside the scope of the site. (It’s the same reason I don’t provide Amtrak and Coaster information, aside from which stations offer connections.)
There are a couple of tenuous artistic reasons for this. (Yes, I said “artistic.”) Every station and line defined in the site is shown somehow on the map when you first hit the homepage. Boom. Everything is right there. Adding bus (or Amtrak or Coaster) lines to that map complicates things, and makes the core Trolley information more difficult to understand. This is where I believe a lot of MTS’s website lost its way.
One of the underlying reasons why I started BetterTrolley was to simplify _just_ the trolley data. I suppose I have to draw the conceputal line somewhere, and admit, yes, BetterTrolley is not a complete public-transit site.
I would be thrilled if a “sister site” came along and did the same thing for San Diego Transit. I would gladly partner with them, provided the site’s information was accurate and precise.
I didn’t mean to add every bus route onto the map, I meant have the list of bus routes pop up when you clicked on an individual station.
Say you click on Fashion Valley, and you have a list of the six or so routes that serve the station.