On: Show HN: Twin Cities Transit "Where's My Bus?"

[godisdad]

I've made a similar app with slightly different navigation using the same Nextrip API: http://mtransit.herokuapp.com/schedule/17900

I need to tweak my full-text search and general layout. But your addition of maps is a nice touch. Adding the location of the stop with a separate icon may be a nice addition.

[pwenzel → godisdad]

Nice to see what other developers are doing with the Nextrip API. I think the market for transit data is going to get pretty busy in the near future!

As an aside, stops are marked with a red marker icon, and buses with a bus icon. This is consistent with the regular "stop" map displayed by default on departure listings. The map icons need a little love, and I'm open to suggestions.

[godisdad → pwenzel]

Ah, I understand the map now. I'm bleary-eyed and missed that.

My grand vision was to do a comet-style app where you see the buses "move" towards your position/stop on a Google Map -- but I haven't been able to sit down and design that yet.

They've added a few more endpoints recently:

http://svc.metrotransit.org/NexTrip/help

Although, I am annoyed because:

NexTrip/{ROUTE}/{DIRECTION}/{STOP}

does not accept the same kind of IDs as the main endpoint 'NexTrip/{STOPID}' and also there are not valid {STOP} ids for every stop on a route.

[pwenzel → godisdad]

It's true. I've also caught a stop ID with a space in it, which seemed kind of non-standard. It caused an error that I was able to fix.

Otherwise the API is a nice service. Previous versions of TCTransit relied on scraping. Dirty, but it still performed nicely.