Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI
by toki5 on Monday September 09, 2013 @03:12PM
(#6355501)
Oh my gosh that logo is unbelievably distracting! Especially when opening a page that "does ____ in real time" -- I spent way longer than I should have thinking "what is this logo doing and what does it have to do with the rest of the page ..."
Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI
by bdon on Monday September 09, 2013 @02:59PM
(#6355428)
The direction (inbound/outbound) comes from NextBus data and is frequently erroneous, so in that case a train traveling outbound is shown with the inbound vehicles.
The position above the last stop is because MUNI vehicles have significant extra track beyond the 4th/King stop that they use to wait and turn around.
Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI
by annymsMthd on Monday September 09, 2013 @05:05PM
(#6356201)
It looks alot like something I did for my last job. Comparing schedules to actual transit bus performance. It's really neat stuff when you start digging into distance/time. http://imgur.com/gmN3EfS
This uses the same type of visualization as the train schedule in Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information: http://www.c82.net/images/java-railroad-lg.jpg
I suppose you could even set the colour dynamically along the track, and set the hue based on how late the train is.
Once I got over that, very cool site :)
fwiw it's just a solid gray in the latest Firefox nightly. No idea if that's by design / site bug / FF bug.
Random look/interface ideas to consider if you continue to tweak, no particular order:
• different colors for inbound/outbound
• different colors or line thicknesses for when the slope is/is-not on 'ideal' schedule
• suppress interior (scroll-wheel) scroll-event capturing: slow and unintuitive on its scaling/shifting effect
• always show +/- 3 stops slopes extending from current vehicle positions ('prediction'/vs-ideal)
• allow selection of stop; decorate arriving vehicles with estimated arrival times (either as numbers or line-extrapolations)
• suppress refresh countdown - distracting, uncancellable, so doesn't add much
• when selecting (or even hovering) over one path/vehicle/stop, and thus showing more info for it, dim all others
There are some oddities, though - what does this mean? http://cl.ly/image/2p0b2c1H2l1X
The position above the last stop is because MUNI vehicles have significant extra track beyond the 4th/King stop that they use to wait and turn around.