In recognition of “National Dump the Pump Day” yesterday, the BJCTA showed off one of their new buses. I must say the new buses look great!
Tag: bus
New version of Android Trip Planner App
I have released a new version of the BJCTA Trip Planner for Android phones. This includes a few small fixes to the geocoding and starts the app centered on BJCTA’s central station, instead of some random location in Nebraska. As always, get it for free from below or in the Google Play store.
MAX Bus Route 40 Available on Trip Planner
BJCTA MAX Bus Route 40, Fairmont, has been completed and is available on the trip planner. The BJCTA Trip Planner Android App will automatically pull in the new route and so will the online trip planner. The 3rd party apps like HopStop will take a while before they update. Â You can find the trip planner at:
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. Â 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.
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:
MAX Bus Route 45 Available on Trip Planner
BJCTA MAX Bus Route 45, South Bessemer, has been completed and is available on the trip planner. This is one of the most heavily used bus routes in Birmingham and I am excited to have finally cataloged it! Â You can find the trip planner at:
Bus Routes 25 and 28 Online
Bus routes 25 (Center Point) and 28 (East Lake) have been completed and are available on my trip planner:
Over 1,000 BJCTA Bus Stops Cataloged
Using my website (http://bjcta.line72.net) to catalog bus stops, we have successfully cataloged over 1,000 stops! I estimate there are somewhere between 2,000 – 3,000 stops in Birmingham. We are making great progress and have already been able to finish about 1/3 of the routes which can be seen on my trip planning website (http://tripplanner.line72.net).
Trip Planner Up
Using Open Trip Planner, I have setup a website for riders of the BJCTA Max Bus in Birmingham, AL to plan out their trips. Â I only have a few of the routes online right now. More routes will be available as their stops are cataloged. Please help test the existing routes and verify the times and locations! You can find the trip planner site below:
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.
Getting Birmingham, AL’s BUS system on Google Transit
Birmingham’s bus system, the MAX, still isn’t up on Google Transit. As a bus rider, I have found this to be a huge hurdle in getting more riders. After four years of their website having a coming soon, and still no trip planner in site, I’ve decided to take on the project myself.
I started off looking for some free programs to create GTFS data. I was unable to find what I needed as they all assumed you already had a database of your stops, and just need to convert the data. Â Unfortunately, the BJCTA does not publicly publish their stop locations, and I’m convinced they don’t even know where their stops are located. This meant I needed to catalog all the stops too.
I’ve started work on software to help me with this project. The project consists of two parts:
- A website to crowd source the stop locations
- An application to take all the cataloged locations, build routes, create time tables, and generate GTFS data
You can find my website for cataloging stop locations here. This site is designed so that anytime you see a bus stop, take a picture of it with a GPS enabled phone, and upload it. This gives me the location of the stop, plus I can see which routes pass through that stop. So far, with the help of the community, I have cataloged over 800 stops. I am estimating there are about 2500 stops in Birmingham, so we still have a long ways to go.
As the community helps me catalog stops, I am also developing an application that takes those stops, builds routes, creates time tables, and generates all the GTFS data. This program has been developed for me, so it is still very rough around the edges, and only implements what I need, but I have released the source, so you can branch it and use it. It currently only runs on linux, I’m running it under Fedora 18. If you want to branch the code, you’ll need the bzr tool.
bzr branch http://bzr.line72.net/subte/master subte-master
Hopefully, in the next few months we’ll have finished cataloging all the stops and will be able to begin beta testing the trip planner on Google Transit! If you are interested in helping out, please visit the above site and start cataloging. Every picture helps!