TramRoute.com goes live
TramRoute.com has launched.
TramRoute.com hopes to provide a simple and clear way of accessing tram information in Melbourne.
We are currently in beta, so please leave any feedback, comments or feature suggestions on this blog post or by contacting support@tramroute.com
Thanks!
Very useful !!
03 Jul 2008 at 12:28 pm
Looks Fantastic. Would love to be able too show a couple of Tram routes at once. As i’m near bridge rd, richmond, i can use two routes to go to town. One other thing, the stop Icons in my opinion are too big. Maybe you could give an option for icon sizes for the trams and the stops. From a pin point, medium to the current size.
Question is this data you are using from the actual tram positions(live), or based on the time-table info.
I love it though, and will refer all my friends that currently use the tram tracker
04 Jul 2008 at 4:13 pm
Fascinating. How to you estimate the position of the trams? Is it calculated based on timetable information? Or does it use the trams’ actual locations (presumably using the tracking system that YarraTrams use for their TramTracker system)? If a tram gets held up for (say) 15 minutes by a traffic accident, will the tram stop moving on your map?
05 Jul 2008 at 2:07 pm
Amazing work, so much better than yarra trams. May I suggest rather than saying travelling west you put something like. Tram 109 to Box Hill or Tram 109 to Port Melbourne. That might be easier. You really have done an amazing job on this. Possibly you could also put the tram tracker id number on the stop details as well. I would be really interested in whether or not you need to update the information as timetables change or if you are scraping the data live. It would be fascinating to learn how you went about it.
07 Jul 2008 at 6:48 am
This is great. The names of the routes are a little big. In some situations they pretty much cover the route itself. Since we’ve clicked on them and you’ve colour coded them I’m not sure they are needed at all. This will be great when the iphone comes out for checking when the next tram is coming.
07 Jul 2008 at 10:00 am
Thanks for all the positive feedback and great suggestions.
I’ll try and incorporate some of the suggestions over the next couple of days.
To answer some of your questions :
- The position of the trams is estimated based of the timetable. Unfortunately it’s not based on live data from the tram tracker system so it’s just a guide at the moment as to where the trams should be. Hopefully one day we will be able to get access to that system to be able to show the accurate position of the trams.
- The direction is represented in both the text describing the direction as well as the route name. You should notice when you click ‘Reverse Direction’ the title will change from say ‘South Melbourne Beach to East Coburg’ to ‘East Coburg to South Melbourne Beach’.
- The timetable information isn’t taken live, but is updated periodically to reflect any changes in the timetable.
- The labels are there to indicate the start and the end of the route for users who aren’t familiar with the geography of Melbourne. I might look at adding a feature to turn them on/off for those that would like to remove them though or when they are obscuring information.
07 Jul 2008 at 12:43 pm
Very, very impressive!
It’s great to see. Any plans for GPS integration with the new iPhone?
07 Jul 2008 at 5:57 pm
I wish there could be some type of integration with GPS aware phones/devices though as far as I’m aware the current/last known coordinates aren’t exposed by the browser.
But we will wait and see what the iphone provides in a couple of days once released.
EDIT: Looks like the GPS data is accessible on some models of the BlackBerry (via JavaScript) so maybe it will be made available at some point through the iphone as well.
08 Jul 2008 at 8:47 am
OK, I tried playing around with a Yahoo Pipe to merge some feeds.
The idea is that sometimes you have multiple services or stops (like Ben above) and you don’t care which line their on. This Pipe merges the feeds and sorts by time.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=_POgoLFM3RGWDwfe8TxBKg
(You can put in two stop numbers and labels.)
Unfortunately, Yahoo’s caching rules may render it a little less useful on subsequent pulls. I tried putting a filter in to drop old times, but not sure it’s effective.
-Greg.
08 Jul 2008 at 6:01 pm
Nice work!
As the site now shows multiple routes for a stop, I’ve gone ahead and
stolen your ideaadded a new brand new feature.To get to it through the interface:
Click on the stop your after, in your example it’s stop 15 for route #48 or #75.
Then click on ‘Show all routes for this stop’.
After it’s refreshed an ‘RSS’ link will be available down the bottom.
The link will provide an aggregated RSS listing of the stops for that list, very similar to what you did using the Yahoo Pipe.
The link just looks like this:
http://www.tramroute.com/rss/timetable/651,652
So you can customise the routes that are included by removing/adding to that comma separated list.
So hopefully this should help you get to the data your after without being hinder by the caching issue.
But let me know though if there’s anything I can do to maybe stop Yahoo caching so aggressively. I’m pretty sure the server is sending out the correct header, there appears to be a distinct Etag for each request and apparently they are meant to be ‘honouring’’ these (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/docs?doc=troubleshooting) , though possibly in favour of less hits than more.
08 Jul 2008 at 10:36 pm
That is fantastic!
Re: caching. The story around the Yahoo Pipes community is that there’s still a 20 minute caching delay for content. They re-jigged it back in March because people were seeing too much difference between what data was available in edit mode and run mode.
Anyway, it’s moot since the RSS service accommodates the merged feeds. Pipes may still offer some features, like email alerts, conversion to iCal (for calendars) or XML, translation into foreign languages and one or two other things (geocoding? widgets?).
I took a look at the Yarra Trams real-time tram tracker thing, and it’s a bastard to get hold of the data: MS ASP.NET AJAX so wget (or Dapper or Yahoo Pipes) aren’t gonna cut it.
But, anyway, well done on rolling out the new features so quickly!
08 Jul 2008 at 11:51 pm
Nice job!
I just sent an email to Yarra Trams asking them if they could build a RESTful API for the real time tram tracking.
It would be great if you get that data like this:
http://yarratrams.com.au/tracker/1847/xml/
Returns an xml document with the next trams from stop 1847.
http://yarratrams.com.au/tracker/1847/86/xml/
Returns only tram 86.
I’ll let you know when they get back to me.
13 Jul 2008 at 4:09 pm