Headway

As some people have noticed, right now it’s hard to get transit routing from Google Maps on iPhones, because Apple’s software grabs most Google Maps URLs and sends them to the built in Maps application. This situation will no doubt be improved in the future, but in the meantime, here’s a workaround.

To get Google transit routing on your iPhone, go to:

http://maps.google.com/transit

and do your search from there. This will give you plain-HTML transit results.

One of the biggest benefits of transit agencies making their raw schedule data publicly available, as TriMet and others have done, is that riders are free to do interesting things with the information that the agency itself might not have thought of or have taken the time to do themselves.

Case in point: Brett Warden in Portland is using TriMet’s GTFS feed to create a POI (points of interest) file for his dashboard-mounted GPS. This means that the very latest TriMet stop data now forms a clickable layer on his Garmin StreetPilot c580. Here are a few screenshots:

Bus stops are shown alongside driving directions.

Stop icons on the GPS map can be clicked on to show…

…the stop name and description, into which Brett has packed the stop ID, fare zone, and lines serving that stop.

Brett told me how he got started on the project:

At first I saw a POI collection, made by hand, of
all TriMet’s light rail stops. That got me thinking — if they made
the data available to Google, maybe they’d let me see it too, and make
a comprehensive map of ALL transit stops. They responded, and pointed
me to the GTFS developer site… by far the easiest experience I’ve
had getting information from a public agency.

To generate the file, he imports the GTFS feed into an SQLite DB and runs a few simple queries to generate the POI file. He plans to post the code soon, which will allow it to be used with other agencies’ GTFS feeds. In the meantime, the resulting TriMet stops POI file is available on the POI Factory site.

It’s been a couple weeks since my last post about transit and the iPhone, and we’re starting to see some iPhone-optimized transit information.

Turncolor, a software startup, has created MuniTime, a pretty iPhone widget that counts down the time to the next bus or train arrival at a particular stop. MuniTime currently supports San Francisco Muni and Portland Streetcar, but I assume that it could easily be adapted to any of the many systems that use NextBus for vehicle tracking. I really like MuniTime; my main wish-list item for them is an easy way to bookmark a particular stop, so that I can easily jump to the right one as I’m roaming around town.

Also, this weekend I threw together iNextMuni, a version of the NextMuni mobile site that has a more iPhone-like style. This was mostly an excuse for me to play around with Joe Hewitt’s iUI interface library, but maybe some of you will find it useful.

Have you come across (or built!) other iPhone-optimized transit applications? Let me know in the comments!

The topic du jour in the geek press is the iPhone, and I can confirm that it is indeed the bees’ knees. I found it interesting that two different online commentators saw fit to point out today that the iPhone is a great way to pass time on public transportation. First, here’s author Steven Johnson:

Here’s one I wouldn’t have predicted in advance: the iPhone makes me want to take a train somewhere. People who have above ground mass transit commutes are going to be psyched. Surfing, checking mail, listening to music, picking up a few calls — all without lugging out a big laptop, or switching back and forth between the Treo and the iPod.

Soon after I read that, I saw that one of Philip Greenspun’s friends summed up his iPhone review with:

If I were a train commuter, or a yuppie with a fast-paced
street life, I’d buy one tomorrow.

Why is this popping up in the zeitgeist? I think the iPhone is introducing many people to the joys of always-on mobile internet. For the past couple of years, my Hiptop/Sidekick has been making my transit trips (and waits in line) more pleasant, and the iPhone is head and shoulders above that device. And surfing the web or watching a TV show on your phone is much more fun than having to stare at the bumper in front of you in the daily traffic jam.

Not only is the mobile internet a good distraction—it’s also a great way to get transit information. For those of us that work on transit sites, the iPhone means more chances to help people when they’re out in the world. I tried out a couple of the transit sites that are dear to my heart on the iPhone’s Safari, and the results were decent:

Google Transit defaults to giving static HTML directions on the iPhone, which works OK. (Draggable web maps don’t really work on the iPhone, since dragging only pans the page.) Unrelated to the Google Transit web app, you can see (but not click on) rail station icons in the iPhone’s native Google Maps application:

buskarma also does fine:

An unexpected benefit here is that buskarma also makes it easy to get to the Pittsburgh Port Authority’s PDF maps, which look great on the iPhone’s PDF viewer (blame the slight blurriness on my photography rather than the Ginsu-sharp screen):

(To get to the PDF schedule and map for a route, just type the route number, say, 54c in the buskarma searchbox, then click printable schedule.)

These work OK, but there’s lots of room for improvement—I would love to see a transit application that’s as well-adapted for the iPhone as the OneTrip shopping list site is. Sure, the iPhone is an extreme niche market right now, so making an iPhone-specific site isn’t going to help the majority of transit riders—yet. However, I hope that the popularity of the iPhone ushers in an era where good mobile internet is commonplace in the U.S., and where more riders get good transit information where and when they need it.