Picture this: you are near the end of your relaxing visit to a cozy pub of coffeeshop. It’s cold outside, and you don’t want to leave before you have a rough idea – say five minutes notice – of when your homebound bus is due to arrive at the closest stop. If you know the bus stop number, you could call the OC info line, but for a multi-route stop that’s a long call and the numbers and times are easy to mix up, especially with other customers talking in the background. You really don’t want to get out in that cold wind before you have to, but it to be on the safe side, you don’t have a choice. Or do you?
Well, with the right mobile device, now you do. Bus riders got a new way to find out schedule information faster last week, thanks to a software engineer who rides the bus. His name is Derek Gour, and he has designed an iPhone app for people who depend on public transit in Ottawa.
Called Transitway, the app costs only 99 cents and is available from iTunes. Here at Spacing we’ve been using the app for a week now and found it to be the fastest and most convenient method check bus schedules in Ottawa.
Impressed, we decided to ask Derek about the story behind the app.
Spacing: Derek, did this app come about because you are dedicated bus user, or because you were looking to sell something useful to iPhone users, or a bit of both?
Derek Gour: I haven’t owned a car in over 10 years, so I’m a serious transit user. I was trying to come up with a relatively simple idea for my first iPhone app, and I realized a transit app that answers the age-old question, “When is my bus going to get here?” would be a great first project.
My goal was to write an app that would replace the “560-1000 plus” system. I was tired of using my precious few phone plan minutes listening to “Route 97, next bus in 5 minutes. Following bus in 15 minutes. Route 98 next bus in 10 minutes”. It’s a great system, but new technology brings new opportunities for improvement.
OCTranspo does have a mobile version of their web site, but it’s not tailored for the iPhone’s display size, and the user design is a bit cumbersome. I don’t want a big table with the whole schedule for the 95 Orleans. I just want to know when the next bus is coming. Taking transit in Ottawa can be a fast-paced, hectic experience and I wanted an iPhone app that would give me schedule information in the few seconds it takes me to climb the steps at the Billings Bridge station. So I built it.
Spacing: Did you take inspiration from transit apps in other cities?
Derek Gour: I didn’t really spend much time looking at the other transit apps. Some of them look pretty, and some of them have a lot of features. I wanted to focus on one core feature: getting stop times based on 4-digit stop numbers, and then build a feature set to make that process as convenient and user-friendly as possible. I had a strong vision of what I wanted TransitWay to accomplish, and I basically built the app for myself.
Spacing: What was the biggest technical hurdle creating this?
Derek Gour: Interacting with the OCTranspo web site, and presenting that information intelligently turned out to be tricky. I don’t have a database in the app. All it does is send 4-digit numbers to the web site and it has to deal with whatever comes down the pipe. It can be a list of stop times, a list of routes, or an error. If there are less than six routes passing through a stop, the user doesn’t have to choose one, but they do need to choose one if there are several routes. Not all routes run every day. All those little complications add up and it all gets a little hairy. Adding the ability to save favorite stops turned out to be much harder than I ever imagined because of this complexity.
Spacing: Did you work with OC to get the data?
Derek Gour: I haven’t dealt with OCTranspo at all. TransitWay is basically a wrapper around their mobile web site. As a transit rider, you now have one more option to get schedule information. You can browse to their site, or you can use TransitWay on the iPhone to get the same information more conveniently.
-photo by Jim Dixon
5 comments
Great idea… if you support proprietary, one-platform solutions. Guess making something web-based, available to all smartphone users, just wouldn’t fit the iFad.
Well Pat, as Derek says in the article, OC does have a mobile version of its website that is web-based – and therefore available to all smartphone users.
Google Maps for the iPhone also has a “Transit” button you can hit. Choose where you’re going, and it’ll map your route from where you are (it uses the built in GPS, so you don’t have to enter that). It will map out all of the different bus routes, your transfers, and the different times each of them will arrive.
I use Craig Davey’s free site at http://www.octranspo.net all the time on my iphone. It works so well you’d think it was an app. Punch in a stop number and pow.
My bus stop has 2 buses that stop at it, plus one that only runs during peak hours. Only 1 bus number shows up, so it’s impossible to find out the schedules of the others.