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Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

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Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#31

Post by Traster »

o10449366 wrote: post #23

I would love to see this come to more cities. I live in a major north American city where public transportation is run by the local government. They have an official transportation app, but it's a buggy mess that's just a wrapper for the phone browser. It features "real time" (their words) route tracking, but as I quickly found out, the busses that move along the map aren't actually representative of the real busses…

I don't know why, but this bad practice seems to be in place in so many places. Live tracking seems to be almost uniformly code for Timetable tracking in public transit. In the UK I can stand and watch the live information for the train departing from Waterloo - it'll say the train is on-time for leaving at 5:30. I can go into their own app, identify the physical train that is going to terminate at waterloo and become my train and find out that it left the last station 20 minutes late. Clearly the system is driven by timetables which are then modified by manual entries rather than some actual underlying representation of the trains (which clearly must exist for them to be able to manage their fleet of trains).

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#32

Post by petra »

kcorbitt wrote: post #17
zhoujianfu wrote: post #16

I assume they (and/or lyft and google maps) will eventually do what google maps should already have in my opinion, a final option next to car/walking/bike/transit/taxi: "multi-modal". A lot of times the fastest way to get somewhere in LA is actually: walk to a scooter, scoot to the train, train to the closest stop, then uber to your final destination. But that isn't shown automatically and it's a lot of work to calcu…

I use Citymapper for this; have for years ( https://citymapper.com/ ). It does exactly what you're asking for. I too am surprised that Google hasn't eaten their lunch by baking this into Google Maps.

I suspect that curating accurate transit data is a lot of boring, never ending work, and on the other hand, Google don't think they will have big enough money there(without building something like UBER, not their style), so they don't bother.

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#33

Post by googlemike »

simplecomplex wrote: post #30
googlemike wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "Municipal ticketing racket"? Did you read the article?

Yeah. You don't think that's a goal? Uber desperately needs to show additional revenue streams as the (un)reality of self-driving cars and food delivery sets in. Muni tickets is big business. Look at Cubic Transportation Systems. > Initially, the ability to purchase tickets via the Uber app won’t be available, but it’s on the horizon. The in-app ticketing portion, in partnership with Masabi, will be available in the…

This seems far less like a revenue stream and far more of a way to get people to use Google Maps less. I am sure they have data showing that very many Uber trips in most major American cities starts with a comparison against local public transit.

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#34

Post by martinald »

Traster wrote: post #31
o10449366 wrote: post #23

I would love to see this come to more cities. I live in a major north American city where public transportation is run by the local government. They have an official transportation app, but it's a buggy mess that's just a wrapper for the phone browser. It features "real time" (their words) route tracking, but as I quickly found out, the busses that move along the map aren't actually representative of the real busses…

I don't know why, but this bad practice seems to be in place in so many places. Live tracking seems to be almost uniformly code for Timetable tracking in public transit. In the UK I can stand and watch the live information for the train departing from Waterloo - it'll say the train is on-time for leaving at 5:30. I can go into their own app, identify the physical train that is going to terminate at waterloo and becom…

? UK Network Rail APIs are the probably the best I've seen. There is ~10,000 real time monitoring sensors on the network. Check out realtimetrains.co.uk for example, which is driven by the STOMP feed from NR (which sends thousands of requests per second on real time location and status of each and every train in the UK).

Regarding your point on outbound trains, often if a train is running late inbound they will have another one take over the duties, so trying to identify it isn't a perfect system for predicting.

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#35

Post by yen223 »

petra wrote: post #32
kcorbitt wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Citymapper for this; have for years ( https://citymapper.com/ ). It does exactly what you're asking for. I too am surprised that Google hasn't eaten their lunch by baking this into Google Maps.

I suspect that curating accurate transit data is a lot of boring, never ending work, and on the other hand, Google don't think they will have big enough money there(without building something like UBER, not their style), so they don't bother.

Google Maps already has realtime transit information for Sydney (and I suspect, any other transit system which offers Google Transit APIs).

The cool thing is that for Sydney, the same APIs are available to the public: https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/dataset/public-transpo...

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#36

Post by fzn »

This website has lately been totally unusable, due to the dark-ux workflow at "https://guce.oath.com/collectConsent/partners/vendors"... I hope they're conscious of the traffic they lose. There's no obvious way to dismiss/slip through and be sure that consent has not been given to third-party data collection. Just saying, not the first time I stumble on that f*ckery. Schade!

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#37

Post by petra »

yen223 wrote: post #35
petra wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect that curating accurate transit data is a lot of boring, never ending work, and on the other hand, Google don't think they will have big enough money there(without building something like UBER, not their style), so they don't bother.

Google Maps already has realtime transit information for Sydney (and I suspect, any other transit system which offers Google Transit APIs). The cool thing is that for Sydney, the same APIs are available to the public: https://opendata.transport.nsw.gov.au/dataset/public-transpo...

Sure. but compared to their competitors, they're really slow.

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#38

Post by alexanderchr »

Traster wrote: post #31
o10449366 wrote: post #23

I would love to see this come to more cities. I live in a major north American city where public transportation is run by the local government. They have an official transportation app, but it's a buggy mess that's just a wrapper for the phone browser. It features "real time" (their words) route tracking, but as I quickly found out, the busses that move along the map aren't actually representative of the real busses…

I don't know why, but this bad practice seems to be in place in so many places. Live tracking seems to be almost uniformly code for Timetable tracking in public transit. In the UK I can stand and watch the live information for the train departing from Waterloo - it'll say the train is on-time for leaving at 5:30. I can go into their own app, identify the physical train that is going to terminate at waterloo and becom…

As a counterexample the company running public transport where I’m from actually released this just a few days ago. So it doesn’t seem to be impossible to do well.

https://skanetrafiken.livemap24.com

Re: Uber’s transit offering just went live in Denver

#39

Post by IanCal »

martinald wrote: post #34
Traster wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why, but this bad practice seems to be in place in so many places. Live tracking seems to be almost uniformly code for Timetable tracking in public transit. In the UK I can stand and watch the live information for the train departing from Waterloo - it'll say the train is on-time for leaving at 5:30. I can go into their own app, identify the physical train that is going to terminate at waterloo and becom…

? UK Network Rail APIs are the probably the best I've seen. There is ~10,000 real time monitoring sensors on the network. Check out realtimetrains.co.uk for example, which is driven by the STOMP feed from NR (which sends thousands of requests per second on real time location and status of each and every train in the UK). Regarding your point on outbound trains, often if a train is running late inbound they will have…

The background data may be great, but I regularly experience standing at a station telling me the train is on time when it is already late (after the point the train should have left).
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