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Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history

publictransit.systems

11–20 of 26 posts

Re: Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history

#11
This is interesting, for sure.

Thinking about this, I think what happens if we take it to the extreme - a system that lets a single user enter his route to work - and compare how various transportation systems, including innovative ones, would impact his day to day.

It's really hard to build such tool, and if it's done well and made appealing to users, it could be the base of a political tool for people to pressure their representatives to implement new and better systems and improve voters lives.

Re: Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history

#18
post #3
post #2

Looks good. London, Paris, Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid? I guess it takes a while to add each new one in.

tysm! Yeah I've got a bit of a backlog, as each set of data for each system needs a deep-dive on how the system exposes it programmatically, then need to do tests and some studying on each to build cars,timelines, etc. Toronto is on the list, if there's any in particular you want, file an issue on gh, and I'll do my best to get it added in a timely manner. https://github.com/wafflethief123/publictransit-systems/issu.…

Working in the industry: this is a can of worms that you might regret opening, because of simply how completely insane so many of the systems there are. I've seen cities repurpose text fields in otherwise perfectly standard formats because they needed a way to indicate that the bus was {insert any absolutely insane situation}, and not parsing that field means that the data doesn't make sense.

Your best bet for most of Europe are the open data platforms. Example for France: https://transport.data.gouv.fr/. There's soooome standardisation around a few formats:

GTFS, Netex, SIRI along with their various extensions (like GTFS-RT for realtime data), etc. Just parsing these (which is already a large undertaking in and of itself) should get you covered for a bunch of networks.

Oh, also, much of the data you'll find, especially from smaller cities or regions, is awful. You're going to be told that the line icon is white, on white text, and that's actually perfectly normal because actually their bus header is from an obscure system from former Yugoslavia that actually interprets "0xFFFFFF" as black when on layer 1. Good luck!

Re: Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history

#19
> Tokyo Metro is one of two rapid transit operators in Tokyo, Japan (the other being Toei Subway)

I'm assuming this text is an AI hallucination because there are dozens of rail operators in Tokyo. Tokyo Metro is not even the largest and basically only operates an underground subway. JR (Japan Rail) operates above-ground and is much larger (and nation-wide).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_rail_systems_in_...

Just a single line of JR East's (Yamanote) moves a third as many people daily as Tokyo Metro does all by itself, and JR has over 50 lines just in Tokyo.

Re: Show HN: Public transit systems as data – lines, stations, railcars, and history

#20

This is interesting! However, can't it switch the unit to meters, not miles? From the link you provided, it appears the API doesn't include information about its unit in the responses. So, it's confusing.

theres a button in the top right to switch from miles to kilometers, that does it globally and handles the calculation gracefully!

Edit: I've had my coffee now, and see what you mean. the API exposes it at /api/systems/{system}/lines/{line}, as well as aggregate for the system at /api/systems/{system}, working on supplying distance unit in api response now.

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