Sneak Peak: Tube Guru Concept
So here is a sneak peak at a concept I’ve been working on for a new site. It’s still a work in progress but it’s going to be very cool when it’s finished. “Tube Guru” is my code name.
The idea for this project is that when you use the tube a lot you start to learn little tricks that make your journey faster from A to B. The right place on the platform to stand to get off at the best exit and the station you are going to. The places most likely you are going to get a seat. All this stuff is local knowledge.
The idea of Tube Guru is to share this knowledge. For the stations I have used to commute between, I know a number of shortcuts which made my journey a bit quicker, for every other station it’s my best guess. Tube guru would give me access to the knowledge of people who do commute those stations.
The mock-up diagram above shows two stations each of which has a picture of a tube train in it. Station landmarks to help the traveller navigate are shown. Things such as stairwells, signs and other things which can be used to indicate where to stand to be right in front of the doors of the train.
It also shows where the best places to board are to exit faster at the station the traveller is going to. This allows the traveller to get board the train at a place which will make it more convenient when they exit. Furthermore, it also shows the best places to get a seat.
While I’m getting stuff mocked-up I would welcome thoughts, ideas, and stuff people might want from such a site.
Technorati Tags:
Web Development, tube, london, tfl
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
That’s pretty cool. I travel from Embankment or Cannon Street to High Street Kensington both ways three times a week, and I’ve already got those mental tricks tied in to my brain. Did you know that District line trains have two more carriages than Circle line trains, and so taking the Circle line means you have to move further up the platform?
I’m working on a Twitter Tube Status system which you might be able to tie in to this. It basically polls London Transport for information about Tube breakdowns and sends the information to users subscribed through Twitter. It’s a bit of caching, Python, BeautifulSoup, the Twitter posting API and some crontabs. Once I’ve got it working for London, I’m going to be doing screen scraping for other cities - Boston, New York and Paris etc.
Perhaps you’d like to tie what you are doing in with the Metro project, which is a database of metro routes across the world available for the Palm, PocketPC, Windows Mobile and Symbian platform. I’m not sure what the data source they use is, but it may be something to look in to. I’ve exchanged emails (about the District Line actually after it gave me ropey directions to go from Wimbledon to Oxford Circus) with the developers and they are very helpful:
http://metro.nanika.net/index-en.html
Perhaps we ought to have a public transport workshop at BarCamp…