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Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by drewblaisdell on Monday September 09, 2013 @05:29PM (#6356358)
Very nice.

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

Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by bdon on Monday September 09, 2013 @06:07PM (#6356592)
I haven't seen that one before, neat! The one featured in the first Tufte book is E.J. Marey's schedule: http://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/marey-train-schedule.j... (as linked from http://mbostock.github.io/protovis/ex/caltrain.html)
Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by stereo on Monday September 09, 2013 @04:50PM (#6356094)
Have you tried using different colours to make it easier to distinguish inbound and outbound, like this? http://www.opentrack.ch/opentrack/downloads/otTrainGraph.pdf

I suppose you could even set the colour dynamically along the track, and set the hue based on how late the train is.

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 ..."

Once I got over that, very cool site :)

Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by Groxx on Monday September 09, 2013 @04:25PM (#6355942)
I couldn't figure out what you were talking about until I tried the site in Chrome xD

fwiw it's just a solid gray in the latest Firefox nightly. No idea if that's by design / site bug / FF bug.

Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by bdon on Monday September 09, 2013 @03:14PM (#6355515)
Haha, point taken. I should really disable that on all sub-pages...
Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by gojomo on Monday September 09, 2013 @06:36PM (#6356756)
Very cool! I live a couple blocks from the N, take it downtown all the time.

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

Re:Show HN: Visualizing transit delays in real time for SF MUNI by Groxx on Monday September 09, 2013 @02:53PM (#6355395)
Neat - I'll have to read on how you did this, I'd love to incorporate it in a transit site/app somehow :)

There are some oddities, though - what does this mean? http://cl.ly/image/2p0b2c1H2l1X

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 Groxx on Monday September 09, 2013 @04:09PM (#6355828)
Oh, of course - I forgot I didn't click the outbound box. After seeing that it's pretty clear :)
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