New Media
January 25th, 2010
“Keep it clean,” says the advisory at the top of Trash Talk the TTC. “Harassment or discrimination is not tolerated.” Well, good. That’s an important policy to have. But we shall see how long a public message board called “Trash Talk the TTC” actually remains a locus of civil discussion.
Because, despite the name, civil discussion does seem to be the intent. Launched Sunday by John Loerchner, an art director at ad agency MacLaren McCann and coordinator of Labspace Studio in Leslieville, TTTTTC is marked by an unexpected earnestness. The introductory letter to Adam Giambrone on behalf of “Riders of the TTC” is stern but affectionate, irked yet hopeful. It promises the site will yield “honest and constructive feedback.”
January 24th, 2010
A little late-night sleuthing by Spacing editors has landed us the domain name of the TTC’s new web-based trip planner. As we revealed earlier this week, the TTC is set to launch the trip planner in the coming week.
We suspect that tripplanner.ttc.ca will be the launching pad for the application. From the looks of the site, it’s pretty obvious that the interface is not complete since there is no TTC logo or matching template from the TTC’s current web site (see images below).
I’ve used the planner tonight for about 30 minutes and had mostly good success: if I entered specific addresses the results came back quickly; if I entered an intersection as a starting point the application would take upwards of 10 seconds to return a result.
I entered a few trips that are lengthy and that I travel on occasion (such as from south Parkdale to the northeastern edge of North York); the planner turned-up reliable results on which routes to take (they were almost always the same routes I’d take). The planner also provided accurate estimates of the time the trip would take.
I have a handful of screen-captures of the three phases of the planner just in case the TTC decides to block anyone from accessing it until it’s complete. It seems to incorporate Google Maps in the final phase when you click on “view details of this trip”.
January 21st, 2010
Spacing and our friends at Torontoist have learned that the TTC is finally set to launch their trip planner within the next two weeks, and possibly as early as next week. The much-needed and long-awaited web-based feature will be available from the TTC’s web site (ttc.ca), but a specific application for mobile devices like the iPhone or BlackBerry is still months away from public release. In order to use the trip planner while on-the-go, riders will have to access it through a web browser on their phone.
The trip planner will work in the same way as Google Maps, but with selected TTC bus, streetcar and subway routes. The length of the transit trip will be listed while riders will also be able to add or remove specific types of transit (ie, subway and streetcar only).
The trip planner was originally projected to be released in the late summer of 2009 and is being added at an additional cost to the main site’s development. From our June 2008 post I wrote, “The trip planner will be available as a beta version in early 2009, with fully functional planner ready for June 2009. TTC staff indicated that the data for a trip planner has taken much longer to implement than anticipated.”
October 20th, 2009
Editor: Spacing is pleased to showcase films from the NFB’s online screening room. The NFB will be occasionally posting films here that explore our public spaces, Canadian or international cities and anything urban. The NFB is one of Canada’s greatest …
September 1st, 2009
What would our city look like in a world that had gone beyond fossil fuels? It’s an important question, for if we can’t paint a picture of the future we want we’re not …
April 30th, 2009
The city clerk is publishing a live blog of the decisions and votes of City Council’s current meeting. It’s remarkably useful — you can see all the outcomes and exactly who voted for what, which …
March 17th, 2009
Some of our readers will have already read my post from early this morning (around 2am) when Spacing got word that the TTC’s GPS tracking system had a “live” web feed (still in beta testing …
March 17th, 2009
Early this morning, Jerrold Litwinenko over at BlogTO broke the lid off of the TTC’s streetcar GPS tracker (in beta still) for mobile devices. He has a detailed post that you can check out, but here’s the simplifed …
March 15th, 2009
Toronto Public Library branches are frequented by a million patrons each year, over 70% of Torontonians have a library card and TPL’s 80 per cent-plus approval rating makes it among the most loved public services in …
February 24th, 2009
Toronto City Council is in session today and you can watch the fireworks streamed live on Rogers website. If you don’t want to watch alone, and are a Twitter user, you can participate in the …
