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mysociety / fixmytransport

A site focussed on connecting and empowering people who share transport problems of different kinds.
http://www.mysociety.org/2010/03/15/mysocietys-next-12-months-fixmytransport-and-project-fosbury/
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Provide location specific links to bus departure and planning information #742

Open paulh8 opened 11 years ago

paulh8 commented 11 years ago

It is clear from the search terms people are using that we get a large number of people arriving at the site looking for information about bus routes and times; perhaps the majority of the 300 people who visit the site for every 1 person who leaves an report.

If we provided an easy way of finding out bus times these people may then return again eventually using us to report a problem. At the moment we just mention The Traveline and Transport Direct, but it is possible to provide location specific links to Transport Direct which would make the user's task much easier as FMT has already done the hard work of identifying the stop (or geographical location):

e.g. http://www.transportdirect.info/web2/journeyplanning/StopInformationLandingPage.aspx?et=si&id=FMT&ef=m&st=n&sd=0500SMELB007 for a bus stop with AtcoCode 0500SMELB007, which I guess is in the FMT database. I thought it was possible to get this to work with Naptan codes, but so far can only find the format for using the AtcoCode.

FMT has better support for mobile phones than The Traveline and Transport Direct and I also don't think they expose a set of bus stops and routes to Google's search, which may explain why so many people arrive at FMT looking for bus information. This is a good opportunity to capitalise on our mobile site to gain loyalty with users.

There are other context sensitive links which could be used in addition to the one above, for example this one with real time departure information.

Links can also direct users to mobile phone friendly departure information from The Traveline: http://www.nextbuses.mobi/WebView/BusStopSearch/BusStopSearchResults?id=cmbdapjg&submit=Search works for naptan code cmbdapjg

paulh8 commented 11 years ago

Transport Direct's technical guide is here: http://www.transportdirect.info/Web2/downloads/BusinessLinksTechnicalGuide.pdf (although I had trouble getting a link using naptan codes to work - the link mentioned in the opening comment was reverse engineered from one presented to Transport Direct from Google Maps).

This site: http://mappa-mercia.org/novam/ shows Naptan and AtcoCode codes.

paulh8 commented 11 years ago

Even if this was not useful for users, it would help volunteers check out the background to comments about bus services.

At the moment if I want to check out what a user has said about a bus service I have needed to hunt around on The Traveline to find the bus stop which could just be a click away. For example if you start here, and wanted to check someone reporting they thought a service was no longer running but the timetable inforamtion on the stop was wrong: http://www.fixmytransport.com/stops/oakham-rutland/market-place-adj You would need to go to http://traveline.info/ work out it was in the EM area then.... well in the past it has sometimes taken quite a bit of fiddling round comparing maps etc to find the exact stop. I admit I don't do this often, but this is partly because it is unnecessarily difficult.

There is a related issue here asking whether FMT could at least print the NAPTAN code of the stop on the page to help me with this: https://github.com/mysociety/fixmytransport/issues/583

I am assuming the NAPTAN or AtcoCodes are already in the FMT core database and that it would be a simple case of fetching them for a stop to be inserted into a link on the page.