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codeforhuntsville / ideas

Place to list project ideas, or to add help refine the goals or functionality of proposed projects.
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App that publishes real-time transit data #23

Open chrisbeaman opened 9 years ago

chrisbeaman commented 9 years ago

From an email from Dennis Madsen:

We were wondering how difficult it might be to take existing real-time transit data (which is technically in the public domain) and make it available via an app. Right now, Transit can track all the shuttles, but they don’t have a way to make that information available to a potential rider, in real-time. It might also be something that could be implemented for the Downtown trolley. Having hand-held access to transit movements would help make the system more attractive to choice riders, I think, and increase utility of the transit network (and perhaps give us ammo in our efforts to expand and modernize it).

stgnet commented 9 years ago

You could do an an initial web-based app version that used gmaps. There might be some issue of refreshing the data however (not all that familir with the gmaps api). For a basic geo location demo of gmaps see http://geo.stg.net/

glmason commented 9 years ago

I would be fairly easy, The biggest issue is where to host the application. It would not take a lot of server resource but just enough. To keep it up most of the time would require either the city make a server available (it does not have to be a dedicated server), or a service like Heroku which would not cost a lot but would incur a small monthly charge.

glmason commented 9 years ago

I was about to relaunch my idea of collecting bicycle travel data, and this would not require much more to add it on. In fact some of the application may already exist in Code for America repository. I believe the City of Philadelphia may have somethi ng very close to this capibility.

stgnet commented 9 years ago

Would run just fine on one of the $5/mo vps instances. I'd be happy to host it temporarily on mine.

larrymason commented 9 years ago

Thanks Scott, That would be a good solution while doing the development, in fact I have plenty of server power and I'm already paying for Heroku dynos... but the point is that at some point the City needs to understand that trust and cooperation is a two way street. In fact just last week I loaded the bus routes and the bus stops from the city GIS onto the OpenDataSoft so we have the APIs to part of the data... but the city will need to push the data, or at least make it available update on a timely basis (every 30 - 60 seconds). Which means the city will need to provide a programmer or technician or allow someone of us who does not work for the city to set it up for them... therein is the sticky part. If the city will do that, then the app is easy.

On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 2:31 PM, Scott Griepentrog <notifications@github.com

wrote:

Would run just fine on one of the $5/mo vps instances. I'd be happy to host it temporarily on mine.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/codeforhuntsville/ideas/issues/23#issuecomment-122385722 .

skylenewman commented 9 years ago

I think that this could be a viable project, but we need to take a step back and discuss what use cases would benefit the shuttle riders the most.

In the Slack channel, @spearna brought up https://www.codeforamerica.org/apps/text-my-bus/