Show HN: SFTransit - easy San Francisco transit times

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4431027

by matthewowen • 14 years ago

7 3 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hello HN,

I built www.sftransit.us to make it easier to get live transit arrival/departure times on your cellphone. Right now, it does Muni and BART. You don't have to download anything, and it takes one click to find times for nearby stops.

I don't live in San Francisco right now (but am moving out there in a few months). I'm really keen to know if this is a useful service, and to know if there's anything that would make it more useful to you. I'm aware there are a few existing tools for this (like Routesy, and the official site [of course]), but I don't think any are as hassle free...

http://www.sftransit.us

matthewowen2• 14 years ago

clickable: http://www.sftransit.us

If you're interested, it's built on Python/Flask, redis, geo.js.

masterzora• 14 years ago

I'll have to try it out next time I need to get anywhere (which will be soon) but just clicking through you appear to have the two things I really need: a one-click spot for nearby stops of all transit (well, you've got Muni and BART but that's both a good start and the majority of my transit) and the ability to save frequent stops. The ability to check buses around a given stop is also something I've been wanting, though less often.

I don't know if you're planning any of this already but I do have a couple suggestions based on my current frustrations with nextmuni:

1. Favourite buses in addition to favourite stops and prioritise said buses when nearby. I know that 21 and 5 are the two best buses to get me home but when I'm downtown they often aren't even on the nextmuni's nearby list because of the density of buses. I'd love to be able to favourite those buses and have them show up first (or at the very least always show up) if a stop is sufficiently nearby even if I'm at a stop I don't frequent.

2. This one would be a bit more of an involved feature and I'm not sure how feasible it is with whatever dataset and/or APIs you have to work with. Basically, I want to be able to input my destination and have the site serve me buses with stops near both end points (if any exist), giving me time estimates near my current location.

Configuring "nearby" would be handy but far from critical, also.

matthewowen2• 14 years ago

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Number one makes a lot of sense - I'll take a look at that. You're right that number two is tricky, but I think it's possible to do something good there - I'll look at it, for sure.

Show HN: SFTransit - easy San Francisco transit times

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