nateparrott

Not sure I agree 100% with the productive/unproductive value system you're establishing, but I do think it's an interesting idea — how can we weight the various aspects of a trip we value (time spent, comfort, cost, environmental and community impact, etc)? Might be interesting to build a system that lets you specify how much you value each of those, and re-rank transit options accordingly?

I really like the idea of building a subway map projection based on travel time, without making you select a starting station. Might play around with force-directed graphs in d3 — meanwhile, looking forward to what you folks come up with!

Thanks! Site looks pretty cool — much more readable than mine :)

It should! As far as I know, GTFS is pretty transport-mode-agnostic. (I imagine the bus stops are a bit more dense, though — it helps that the NYC map has a recognizable set of line colors that remain familiar when you jumble it all up)

You need to tap a couple times — the first tap triggers the hover state (definitely not ideal for mobile). Unfortunately, it's a bit hard to hit the same stop consistently multiple times...

Just pushed some changes to make it a (little) easier to use on a small phone. Still far from perfect, but a little better!

The issue with using average waiting times (as opposed to picking a particular time and computing actual waiting times) is stations with multiple trains — the N, R and Q might each stop at Union Square once every 10 minutes, but if you're happy boarding any of those, then your average wait time isn't 5 minutes — it's much less.

What I might try is sampling a couple random start times (e.g. 8:00 AM, 8:03 AM, 8:22 AM) and averaging the predictions of all those.

I'm calculating travel times by simulating a rider starting from the selected stop at a specific time (for example, "weekday late night" is 3 AM, and "rush hour" is 8 AM) and "waiting" for he next scheduled train. That's why, when you select most stops during late night, the nearest stops are pretty far (~ 10 minutes) away — because that's a typical time you'd wait for a train at that time of night. It's definitely not a perfect prediction.

And yep — I really need to put some work into the mobile experience. I'm surprised it works at all!

Thanks! Turns out the MTA does keep a pretty detailed schedule (not that they manage to stick to it much, these days) in the GTFS format, so it's not hard to compute travel times client-side. As a plus, GTFS seems pretty-widely used, meaning it shouldn't be so hard to port this to other transit systems!

This. I can't find a single example of an actual UI you'd build with famo.us on their entire site. How am I supposed to know what makes the framework worth learning if I don't see examples of what it makes possible?

No particular reason. The API currently involves importing `plugin.py` files and calling functions in them, which makes it a bit simpler, but it should be possible to bridge with other languages. I've considered using Javascript for Automation, but there isn't a huge amount of documentation around it, so it hasn't been that valuable.

That's embarrassing... I'll run off and debug that right now.

Edit: should be fixed in the next build of the translator plugin. Now to update the screenshot...