I'm just FUCKING THRILLED that transitinfo.org is getting a "new home", aren't you?
Richard Mlynarik
The zones shown in
http://www.transitinfo.org/Caltrain/IMG/station.gif
are out of date as of last Monday.
Back when transitinfo.org was maintained by "amateurs" who
actually knew and cared about transit information, timely
and accurate updates were always made -- or fixed within
hours when alerted that something had changed.
http://www.transitinfo.org/Caltrain/fares.html lists obsolete zones
and obsolete prices and obsolete ticket prices. Everything is wrong.
I'd make a correct and up-to-date HTML page for you to simply insert
as a replacement, but since there is no evidence that ANYBODY is doing
ANY maintenance on transitinfo it doesn't seem worth my time. If
somebody would take such a submission, I'll be more than happy to
contribute.
The fares returned via
http://www.transitinfo.org/cgi-bin/auto_sched?C=CT
and
http://www.transitinfo.org/cgi-bin/map_sched/CT
and the trip planner are incorrect.
Boy, life was sure a whole lot better when the assholes
of MTC weren't involved in "running" transitinfo.org, wasn't it?
There are no station-to-station BART schedules on the site.
The Caltrain Millbrae station information doesn't show BART.
The Caltrain Millbrae station area map is broken, as is a large
percentage of maps in general.
The trip planner STILL refuses to show TRANSIT MAPS of the origin,
destination and transit locations.
The Berkeley BART area maps show Fruitvale.
Everything is broken.
But boy, http://www.transitinfo.org/ANNC/20030627.html
lets me know "Transitinfo.org is getting a new home!
In the Fall of 2003, Transitinfo.org will be moving to 511.org.
Major improvements are coming - the new 511.org Transit website
will continue to house the popular Take Transit Trip Planner,
and several new features will make it easier to get the transit
information you want."
I know everybody is just FUCKING THRILLED to know that a
"new home" is coming, even though nothing has worked for
the last six months or more. How much is MTC forking over
for this website contract anyway? What was required to get
the contract? Job experience with flooz.com? pets.com?
-- Richard.
Michael Kincaid
> http://www.transitinfo.org/Caltrain/fares.html lists obsolete zones
> and obsolete prices and obsolete ticket prices. Everything is wrong.
Oddly, the top part of that page - the monospaced zoned fare list -
was actually correct for a while a few days ago. Now it seems to have
reverted for some reason. What's worse, Caltrain just links to that
page from their own site.
http://www.caltrain.com/schedule_tickets.html (This non-redundancy
used to be a good idea, actually, when Transitinfo could be counted on
to be correct.) There was a PDF with the new fares, but you have to go
digging through the news archive to find it now:
http://www.caltrain.com/pdf/fare_change_chart.pdf
(They did a good job with the distribution of new paper schedules,
announcement banners and the like. Oh well, guess there is always a
weak link.)
Kim
It's going to be a sad day when Transitinfo switches over to 511.org
in a couple of weeks. The site should've remained in the hands of
volunteers with just some $$ from MTC for the servers and anything
else to keep it online.
Kim R.
Keith Keller
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On 2003-09-24, Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote:
>
> Back when transitinfo.org was maintained by "amateurs" who
> actually knew and cared about transit information, timely
> and accurate updates were always made -- or fixed within
> hours when alerted that something had changed.
Hmm. Could a group of ''amateurs'' start a new site aiming to fill the
role that transitinfo once did? It would certainly be a massive
undertaking, but perhaps worth it?
--keith
--
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(try just my userid to email me)
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Bill Z.
> On 2003-09-24, Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote:
> >
> > Back when transitinfo.org was maintained by "amateurs" who
> > actually knew and cared about transit information, timely
> > and accurate updates were always made -- or fixed within
> > hours when alerted that something had changed.
>
> Hmm. Could a group of ''amateurs'' start a new site aiming to fill the
> role that transitinfo once did? It would certainly be a massive
> undertaking, but perhaps worth it?
>
> --keith
Not when you factor in the cost of an internet connection with
enough bandwidth to be used by large numbers of people.
A dedicated 10 Mb/s connection costs around $10,000 per month,
the last time I checked. Web-hosting companies charge based
on how much bandwidth you use. They often use the same pricing
model as cell phone companies: a per monthly charge for up to
so many megabytes per month, with steep charges if you exceed
that.
--
My real name backwards: nemuaZ lliB
Charles Hobbs
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>
> On 2003-09-24, Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote:
>
>>Back when transitinfo.org was maintained by "amateurs" who
>>actually knew and cared about transit information, timely
>>and accurate updates were always made -- or fixed within
>>hours when alerted that something had changed.
>
>
> Hmm. Could a group of ''amateurs'' start a new site aiming to fill the
> role that transitinfo once did? It would certainly be a massive
> undertaking, but perhaps worth it?
>
Go ahead and try it. There was an all-volunteer site called socaltip
that covered Southern California. But the job became bigger than the
three or four people that originally started it, so we kind of let it
slide until the site owner finally put it out of its misery....
One of the big problems with it was getting machine-readable copies
of schedules from the agencies. Oh sure, you can type up a bus schedule
by hand and it might even be fun....once....
A lot of agencies use PDF or other formats that are hard to convert
into simple, readable text. Sites that put their bus schedules in
HTML tables are a bit easier to work with....
Hank Fung
Charles Hobbs <chobbs...@socal.rr.com> wrote:
>Go ahead and try it. There was an all-volunteer site called socaltip
>that covered Southern California. But the job became bigger than the
>three or four people that originally started it, so we kind of let it
>slide until the site owner finally put it out of its misery....
>
>One of the big problems with it was getting machine-readable copies
>of schedules from the agencies. Oh sure, you can type up a bus schedule
>by hand and it might even be fun....once....
>
But SoCalTIP was created in the days when information for cities was
not easily available. Remmeber that there are at at least 50 transit
agencies in Southern California. Sure, they might only run two or three
routes, but back in 1996, when that started, none of that was available.
Now, schedules are more readily available on the web. The Web has also
changed. In the old days, a lot of people were still on text. That
really started to shift in 1999, when libraries that used to only have
text terminals to access the Internet, if that, started to get online.
The process continued through 2001. While text is useful for access
on cellphones, that is a really small subset of the population. Even
transitinfo.org fails to work on WAP. WAP and AvantGo are the saviors
of the text-only, low-bandiwdth browsing experience, but even the
most basic transit schedule has many tables and fails to meet the
needs of WAP. And there is a PDF viewer for Palm anyway, so schedules
downloaded can be viewed.
Almost every little city that runs their shuttle has put their schedule
on the web. With that, the need for an independent information site
has been ameliorated.
--
Hank Fung fun...@ocf.berkeley.edu
Go Bears! Yes on Recall... No on Bustamante
Mikael Sheikh
Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote:
> Back when transitinfo.org was maintained by "amateurs" who
> actually knew and cared about transit information, timely
> and accurate updates were always made -- or fixed within
> hours when alerted that something had changed.
In article <50dfeaa7.03092...@posting.google.com>,
la...@fastmail.ca (Kim) wrote:
> It's going to be a sad day when Transitinfo switches over to 511.org
> in a couple of weeks. The site should've remained in the hands of
> volunteers with just some $$ from MTC for the servers and anything
> else to keep it online.
Well, the site was last in the hands of amateur volunteers way back in
May, 1996. OK, we may have remained "amateurish" relative to the web
development industry after that, but we were getting paid for our
efforts.
But we appreciate the sentiments...
-MS
Richard Mlynarik
> Keith Keller wrote:
[...)
> One of the big problems with it was getting machine-readable copies
> of schedules from the agencies. Oh sure, you can type up a bus schedule
> by hand and it might even be fun....once....
>
> A lot of agencies use PDF or other formats that are hard to convert
> into simple, readable text. Sites that put their bus schedules in
> HTML tables are a bit easier to work with....
The agencies are generally far more than willing to cooperate.
A number of them have expressed their incredible frustration with
MTC and its contractor to me.
The problem is that (a) MTC simply DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT about
actual transit users -- its constituency, after all, being the
consultant mafia and the politicians which represent them -- and
(b) agencies [other than BART, which always gets what it wants)
can't really bitch at MTC, since the next thing is that they'll
get slagged for being "uncooperative" with something like MTC's
"bold regional initiatives" which enjoy "wide public support"
and the next thing they know they've had a few million whacked
off some budget as a warning. (Yes, it happens.)
We're doomed.
David Nebenzahl
Possibly.
I'd like to know, since I missed it, how Transitinfo started in the first
place. A little condensed history: who funded it? how was it coordinated? (I
actually know one of the people who worked on it at UCB, but I never knew the
details of what he did or of the project itself.) Perhaps such a
recapitulation might be useful for this discussion.
--
Why isn't "phonetic" spelled fonetically?
Charles Hobbs
> But SoCalTIP was created in the days when information for cities was
> not easily available. Remmeber that there are at at least 50 transit
> agencies in Southern California. Sure, they might only run two or three
> routes, but back in 1996, when that started, none of that was available.
>
[...]
>
> Almost every little city that runs their shuttle has put their schedule
> on the web. With that, the need for an independent information site
> has been ameliorated.
Still, I'd like to see a page that shows all the routes, even
if it just provides links to the agency's PDF files....
>
Bill Z.
> Well, the site was last in the hands of amateur volunteers way back in
> May, 1996. OK, we may have remained "amateurish" relative to the web
> development industry after that, but we were getting paid for our
> efforts.
>
> But we appreciate the sentiments...
Actually, the "amateurs" in this case produce far better sites than
the "experts," who tend to be graphics designers who care about how
the site looks, and about how to impress their friends with "cool"
designs, more than about how the site works.
Bill Z.
> Almost every little city that runs their shuttle has put their schedule
> on the web. With that, the need for an independent information site
> has been ameliorated.
Not really. First, yo uhave to find these web sites and second, you
can't readily integrate the data from them.
What MTC should be mandating is the use of a database schema or an XML
format for the schedules. A web site can always format this anyway it
likes using a servlet or other means, but if it is then 'machine
readable' with well-defined semantics so that programs can use it as
well. BTW, besides a station or stop name, it should contain
information such as the latitude and longitude (or, equivalently, UTM
coordinates) of each station or stop and the enough points along each
route so that you can overlay these on a map.
A 'trip planner' really isn't that hard to write if you have the
schedules in a usable format, and don't have to treat each agency as a
special case.
Bill
Keith Keller
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On 2003-09-26, Bill Z. <nob...@nospam.pacbell.net> wrote:
>
> Not when you factor in the cost of an internet connection with
> enough bandwidth to be used by large numbers of people.
If it got to that point, the (at this point hypothetical) group
of volunteers may be able to find an organization willing to
share its bandwidth with a new transitinfo. Of course, it's a moot
point right now, since there's nothing to serve. :)
--keith
--
kkeller...@wombat.san-francisco.ca.us
(try just my userid to email me)
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Silas Warner
>
> Almost every little city that runs their shuttle has put their schedule
> on the web. With that, the need for an independent information site
> has been ameliorated.
Not really. For instance, it is possible to ride from Willows, through
Chico, to Portola by public transit, But just try to find out how to
do this on the Web! The only way is to physically visit the Chico
bus stop where Glenn, Butte, and Plumas County buses meet.
A complete survey of California transit systems is desperately needed.
Ten years ago, there was a book "California by Rail" that included
many connecting buses. Now that is obslete, and a replacement
is needed.
Silas Warner
bikerider7
> The Caltrain Millbrae station information doesn't show BART.
> The Caltrain Millbrae station area map is broken, as is a large
> percentage of maps in general.
> The trip planner STILL refuses to show TRANSIT MAPS of the origin,
> destination and transit locations.
> The Berkeley BART area maps show Fruitvale.
> Everything is broken.
Did you submit a comment? Over the years I've found lots of
mistakes and they get fixed pretty quickly.
>
> I know everybody is just FUCKING THRILLED to know that a
> "new home" is coming, even though nothing has worked for
> the last six months or more.
> How much is MTC forking over
> for this website contract anyway? What was required to get
> the contract? Job experience with flooz.com? pets.com?
Unlikely. During the dot-com boom, it was imperative to get
websites like pets.com up-and-running ASAP -- within days or
weeks. The MTC (and/or its contractor) has been working on
511.org for well over a year now, which is an eternity when
measured in computer years (especially given the minimal
requirements of the project).
Most likely, the contractor is maximizing the number of billable hours
to the greatest extent possible, which is what generally happens in any
government IT project, particularly in an organization like the
MTC which has no IT expertise in-house.
It is also interesting to note that for the "bicycling" section, 511.org
could not be bothered to provide any maps, so instead they link to external
bikemap websites -- including one done by your's truly as a volunteer
effort. Perhaps I should bill them....
Kim
>
> One of the big problems with it was getting machine-readable copies
> of schedules from the agencies. Oh sure, you can type up a bus schedule
> by hand and it might even be fun....once....
>
> A lot of agencies use PDF or other formats that are hard to convert
> into simple, readable text. Sites that put their bus schedules in
> HTML tables are a bit easier to work with....
I'm not a fan of PDF timetables and more sites are using them. Since
I maintain a transit site, I prefer getting the schedules in Excel
instead of PDF since it's easier for me to convert them to HTML for
the site.
Kim R.
Kim
The site's simple look all these years made it easy for all the users
who didn't want to spend 12 years looking for info they needed.
Transitinfo's About Us page has a little history about that site.
Kim R.
RicSilver
SW>A complete survey of California transit systems is desperately needed. Ten
years ago, there was a book "California by Rail" that included many connecting
buses. Now that is obslete, and a replacement
is needed.
Well, you'll all be happy to know that RailPAC is in the process of putting a
replacement together.
It will include All passenger rail service, the connecting Amtrak or local bus
connections and Ferry Service.
Richard Silver
650-368-7112
www.RailPAC.org
Michael Kincaid
> And there is a PDF viewer for Palm anyway, so schedules
> downloaded can be viewed.
Doesn't work. VTA schedules, at least, get turned into unreadable crap
by Adobe's PDF reader and Documents to Go. Caltrain's PDF schedule,
last I checked, was just a scanned image that hadn't even been OCRed
(that was before the Sept 22 changes, they may have improved since).
The only satisfactory way I've found is a custom-written .prc (a la
BART and Caltrain). There are some generic "train-schedule" apps for
which one could customize the data, but none seem flexible enough to
do an entire bus system like SamTrans and VTA which have dozens of
routes. A standardized format, like an XML schema, that all the
operators post in, would be great (it'll probably happen when Caltrain
gets extended to downtown and electrified, VTA makes an operating
profit, BART-SFO recovers its massive capital costs, MTC starts
properly taking care of transitinfo - er - 511.org, and the sky
falls.)
David MR
"Bill Z." <nob...@nospam.pacbell.net> wrote in message
news:m3oex7m...@nospam.pacbell.net...
the citizens are stupid so they (governments) think they need to put useless
graphics and other fancy crap on their pages when all the people want is an
easy-to-use page to get information.
--
David R
http://home.attbi.com/~damiross
http://home.attbi.com/~damiross/books.html
Keith Keller
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On 2003-09-30, David MR <dami...@comcast.net> wrote:
> Governments think
> the citizens are stupid
Hey, the one thing government gets right! ;-)
--keith
--
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Freddy Smith
You can see a preview of the new 'transitinfo' by going to
http://198.94.156.204/ username-- preview password-- transit.
There's also a link from transitinfo.org too. Lookie at the new way
the bus scheds are done. It's horrid. Why?
Fred Smith
Fred Smith
David MR
> http://198.94.156.204/ username-- preview password-- transit.
> There's also a link from transitinfo.org too. Lookie at the new way
> the bus scheds are done. It's horrid. Why?
>
> Fred Smith
>
it.
I have viewed hundreds of transit pages. Many are done by webmasters that I
can only say are in the amateur class. They overdo graphics, make it
difficult to find information quickly, quite often have lousy schedule
layouts.
I stand by my claim that most (not all) government agencies have not
friggin' idea how to do web pages. Hey, if they (the government webmasters)
were any good, they'd be working for themselves or in private industry.
David R
David Nebenzahl
> I stand by my claim that most (not all) government agencies have not
> friggin' idea how to do web pages. Hey, if they (the government webmasters)
> were any good, they'd be working for themselves or in private industry.
Believe me, if the people who did the original Transitinfo site worked for the
guv'mint, the pages they'd do would knock your socks off and be extremely
useful and usable. (I used to work with one of the original creators of the
site, and from what I remember, he wouldn't be disinclined to work for the gov.)
--
Call the American Teleservices Association at (317) 816-9336
and let them know just how much you appreciate their "services".
Telephone # courtesy of Dave Barry (yes, that Dave Barry).
(Read all about it on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/articles/03/10/05/1350243.shtml?tid=103&tid=133&tid=158&tid=186&tid=99)
Yeoh Yiu
> bay_bri...@yahoo.com (bikerider7) wrote in message news:<d35d6005.0309...@posting.google.com>...
> > Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote in message news:<gunvfrh...@bolt.sonic.net>...
> > >
> > > There are no station-to-station BART schedules on the site.
> > > The Caltrain Millbrae station information doesn't show BART.
> > > The Caltrain Millbrae station area map is broken, as is a large
> > > percentage of maps in general.
> > > The trip planner STILL refuses to show TRANSIT MAPS of the origin,
> > > destination and transit locations.
> > > The Berkeley BART area maps show Fruitvale.
> > > Everything is broken.
...
> You can see a preview of the new 'transitinfo' by going to
> http://198.94.156.204/ username-- preview password-- transit.
> There's also a link from transitinfo.org too. Lookie at the new way
> the bus scheds are done. It's horrid. Why?
2003 Nov. 03 kills existing customer base:
(this just in)
-----------------
On this Monday, November 3rd, the www.transitinfo.org website is
scheduled to relocate to 511.org (which will include a link to the new
511 Transit website). The new website will continue to offer details
about Bay Area transit schedules, routes, fares, maps, and other
currently offered information, but with an updated look and feel, and
some new user features.
As part of this website upgrade, the process for receiving email
notifications about Bay Area transit service updates for which you
have registered will also be changing.
EFFECTIVE NOVEMBER 3RD, 2003, THE EMAIL UPDATE NOTIFICATIONS FOR WHICH
YOU ARE REGISTERED WILL BE TEMPORARILY SUSPENDED. In the future, this
email update feature will be incorporated into a section of the new
website called "My Transit Page", which is currently under
development.
When the "My Transit Page" feature does becomes available, those of
you interested in continuing the email update notification service
will need to register through that section of the new website to
continue the service.
We do not yet have an exact date for the rollout of the "My Transit
Page" section, but will be working to complete it as soon as possible.
Please check our new website in the coming weeks for announcements
about a target date for launch of the "My Transit Page" section and
email update notification feature.
Thank you for your patience during our transition period.
MTC Regional Transit Information project
Bill Z.
> fred...@accountant.com (Freddy Smith) writes:
>
> > bay_bri...@yahoo.com (bikerider7) wrote in message news:<d35d6005.0309...@posting.google.com>...
> > > Richard Mlynarik <M...@POBox.COM> wrote in message news:<gunvfrh...@bolt.sonic.net>...
> > > >
> > > > There are no station-to-station BART schedules on the site.
Besides no station-to-station schedules (which means you have to consult
multiple schedules to find all the times you can go from Daly City to
San Francisco, for example), they also eliminated the ability to show
all such trains within a time window. You can't, for example, say
that I can arrive in SF at any time between 6 and 7:15, leaving from one
of two Palo Alto stations (Cal Ave and downtown) and would like to
know which trains are available. An hour window may sound large,
but if you are going to some performance, and will be getting dinner
as well, you could use a restaurant at either end of the trip. You
might prefer to minimize travel time, but would want one additional
train as a backup in case an accident before your stop delays one
of them. And you don't want to print out long schedule lists to
get this information.
> When the "My Transit Page" feature does becomes available, those of
> you interested in continuing the email update notification service
> will need to register through that section of the new website to
> continue the service.
This is a clone of the "my foobar" pages many web sites use. Real
creative. Given the frequency of notifications, email is just
fine. The "my foobar" approach, however, allows them to track
what pages you view and tie that to you personally. So to use it,
you have to really understand the privacy policy, if they
have one. John Ashcroft may be interested in your travel
plans too.