BJCTA Routes Available on 3rd Party Apps

As I have been working on cataloging the BJCTA bus stops and generating route data, I have been posting it online at the gtfs-data-exchange for anyone to use. While major companies like Google won’t pick up on this data until it is certified by the agency, smaller 3rd party applications are.

 

Over the weekend, HopStop updated their app and included my transit data for the BJCTA buses. HopStop has free apps on Android, iPhone, and Windows phone devices. While I have released my own trip planner for android devices (BJCTA Trip Planner), I don’t yet have one for iPhones or Windows phones, so I’m glad to see 3rd party apps incorporating my data!

HopStop Website | HopStop for Android | HopStop for iPhone | HopStop for Windows Phone

 

If anyone knows of any other 3rd party apps that have picked up my GTFS data, please comment!

BJCTA (Max) Bus Trip Planner for Android

I have created a Trip Planner app for Android phones. This was based on an open source OTP project that I was able to modify and customized to run against my trip planner.  It costs nothing and has no ads. Please give it a try an let me know if you like it! It is available in the Google Play store under the name BJCTA Trip Planner.

 

device-2013-05-06-102309 device-2013-05-06-103104

You can learn more about it from the link below.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.line72.bjcta.opentripplanner.android

You can also grab the source code and submit patches from my github site:

https://github.com/line72/OpenTripPlanner-for-Android

New bikes for the Bike Share

Thanks to Regions Bank for donating two new bicycles for the Bike Share at my office, the Innovation Depot. We now have six bikes available for free to anyone that works at the Innovation Depot to use.

The Innovation Depot is a technology incubator for start up technology companies. My company, VIPAAR, is one of those.  Currently, there are over 80 companies at the Innovation Depot. I started the bike share last fall because the Innovation Depot is on the west side of downtown, just slightly out of range of a comfortable walk, but easily within biking distance to all the restaurants and shops.  Since then, I have seen a steady progression of use, and am expecting it to gain popularity even more as Spring rolls around.

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Initial Bus Transit Directions

Continuing on with my project to get Birmingham’s MAX bus system on Google Transit, I was able to get the Open Trip Planner software up and running. This is letting me visualize some of the preliminary GTFS data to validate it before I continue work on the rest of the routes.  Here’s two examples showing trip planning between various locations. The stop locations are coming from my stop cataloging site.

 

Riding from Downtown to the west side on Bus #8
Riding from Downtown to the west side on Bus #8
Riding from Highland Park to South side on bus #12
Riding from Highland Park to South side on bus #12