New Dublin Bus timetable search

fruit

Hi all,

There's a new bus search we've made at http://www.pearsmiths.com/bustle/

It's been made out of frustration at how hard it currently is to search for several bus numbers at once (say you've several buses from town going to the same stop and want to see all their times collectively). With this you can see all the timetables for buses you want at a certain hour (ie, the 15 15a 15b and 49a for between 7 and 8pm).

It's far from perfect and we're aware of lots of potential fixes. Also, it's only as useful as knowing the starting time of a bus and relies on them being punctual.

The majority of bus numbers are in it. As yet it has no Xpressos or Nitelinks.

I signed up to point out the website but saw that you're not really meant to sign up just to point out things like that. Hope this is useful enough to people that this post isn't frowned upon.

angel01

Quite handy thanks! I will bookmark that

Jeanious

yeah very handy alright, the only thing i dont like about it is having to scroll.

Actually if its any use to ya, in england (or at least liverpool) theyres codes for the actual bus stop as well as the buses themselves. So for example, if ya live near a stop, itll have a code like ABMQW. ya can then use bustext to check the times and routes of ALL the buses that go past that stop, i dunno if thats of any interest to ya, but i always thought itd be handy over here (in addition to the bustxt service that we have now), what with the sheer amount of busstops that are just thrown in the ground and need local knowledge to know what bus goes there.

Its a pain over there cos ya couldnt get info by text on the particular bus ya wanted (however most all of their busstops had the timetable sticker on them, unlike here), and obviously the opposite is true here, i.e. ya need to know the number of the bus youre lookin for.

just a random thought anyway!

fruit

Coyle - it's be great if we had that but that sort of job is practically impossible for a joe soap to do. It really needs the input of Dublin Bus themselves who have that list to hand. It's a massive undertaking without having a list already. Thanks for the input

Victor

I signed up to point out the website but saw that you're not really meant to sign up just to point out things like that. Hope this is useful enough to people that this post isn't frowned upon.

We generally have no problem with people who give. We have problems with people who only take.

fruit wrote: »

It's far from perfect and we're aware of lots of potential fixes. Also, it's only as useful as knowing the starting time of a bus and relies on them being punctual.

Its a good start.

What are the limitations - I stuck in about 8 routes and it returned 5 - with each way shown. You might consider altering it so that each direction is shown quite separately. I realise this is difficult in places, e.g. the 14, 14a and 48a are all suburb-bound on D'Olier Street, but the 14 and 14a are city-bound on Ballinteer Road, while the 48a is still suburb-bound.

Instead of saying:

07:00 07:10 07:20 07:30 07:40 07:50

You could say:

07:00 10 20 30 40 50

Or

07: (in the top row)
00 10 20 30 40 50

On the likes of route 67, it needs to explain what "p" means - "p From Parkgate Street"

Also note http://www.mkmap.com/dublin

fruit

Hi Victor,

We put a 5 bus limit on it for the moment - mainly for layouts sake. This gives buses in both directions. As you suggested, it's easier said than done to give one direction only. Bustle really only works on the back of what information Dublin Bus has on offer to the public and changes how it's presented. It relies on getting most of its information automatically (with a little help with troublesome bus numbers) because of the large amount of buses. It wouldn't exist if it needed each bus number to be entered one by one.

It's the buses that don't fit into a definite 'to town' or 'away from town' peg hole that would cause further trouble with giving the option of choosing one direction only. There's certainly ways but we aimed from the start to make this service simple and instant. If all the buses don't behave the same way and you've to start making too many exceptions for options, it puts the simplicity in jeopardy. We'll have a think about possibilities anyway. In the meantime, a slight concession is that you can bunch relevant buses together if you drag their timetable bars into whatever order you want. This works on most computers.

You noticed a further limitation in that we don't explain symbols. Dublin Buses timetables aren't consistent enough to be able to automatically gather all the notes for its symbols it places after its times. If the same symbols on each timetable had the same notes it would be quite easy. The side effect of all this is that Bustle is more suited to those somewhat familiar with a route than those who wouldn't have used a route before (ie, people getting home from work rather than tourists). This is one of our biggest annoyances with what we've made and we're working on it. As a start, if a symbol in a timetable notifies that the bus for that time has a different bus route number, a note does appear. We rely on the published Dublin Bus timetables as the times are open to changing at any moment (meaning it's difficult to make changes from what is automatically grabbed from them as they could be changed just as you finish going through each bus).

The majority of our initial problems come from the inconsistency of the Dublin Bus timetables in how they're laid out and managed. Lots of them deviate from the original layout that they were intended to stick to. Some combine several bus numbers onto one timetable. If we get to a point where we can put details for every single bus in by hand, these problems will be ironed out. Where possible, we've tried to put notes in to stop these quirks getting missed. They should appear if you pick a bus that has a strange quirk.

We'll keep that time format idea in mind, thanks.

The Dublin transport map on mkmap is great except for the fact it runs off mkmap, which I find slow (probably Google maps fault), a bit confusing and it often breaks on me. I love the fact it has all routes drawn in though, that's wonderful and highlights again what transport service providers aren't providing that end up in members of the public doing themselves.

Jeanious

fruit wrote: »

Coyle - it's be great if we had that but that sort of job is practically impossible for a joe soap to do. It really needs the input of Dublin Bus themselves who have that list to hand. It's a massive undertaking without having a list already. Thanks for the input

yeah absolutely, id say even for dublin bus it'd be a farily hefty undertaking. Just puttin that out there anyway.

As for what ya said about the symbols, i totally agree. Nearly every bleedin (dublin bus) timetable ya look at has symbols for buses goin different routes in the morning and evening etc. What also annoys the piss outta me is the fact that even on the website they have the likes of the 42a lumped into 42 timetable (last time i checked anyway!) I can understand it at the stop but jaysus, in this day and age they should be able to manage a page for each.

Good work anyway, its definitely an improvement...and theyve had 70 or 80 years headstart on ya!

fruit

coyle wrote: »

yeah absolutely, id say even for dublin bus it'd be a farily hefty undertaking. Just puttin that out there anyway.

As for what ya said about the symbols, i totally agree. Nearly every bleedin (dublin bus) timetable ya look at has symbols for buses goin different routes in the morning and evening etc. What also annoys the piss outta me is the fact that even on the website they have the likes of the 42a lumped into 42 timetable (last time i checked anyway!) I can understand it at the stop but jaysus, in this day and age they should be able to manage a page for each.

Good work anyway, its definitely an improvement...and theyve had 70 or 80 years headstart on ya!

Thanks Coyle. Yes these are frustrating little problems to have to decipher in the original timetables. I'd love to see a bit more consistency so that if the little symbols had to be used after times, that they would be familiar from several timetables (ie, the way the C symbol commonly means the bus terminates at the city centre.)

I'm nearly finished updating Bustle for using on mobiles. There won't be a separate website - the page will know if you're on a mobile and and will scale everything to a mobile screen size as well as stripping all the graphics out to save it costing much to look at. I'll post here when it's ready.

MOH

Like it, it's useful and pretty quick.
Only thing I raelly don't like is scrolling across - definitely think it would work better re-oriented to scroll vertically.

lostexpectation

http://www.nextbus.ie/

fruit

MOH wrote: »

Like it, it's useful and pretty quick.
Only thing I raelly don't like is scrolling across - definitely think it would work better re-oriented to scroll vertically.

We'll keep that in mind. It was no harder to make it scroll vertically, I guess I'm just a fan of sideways scrolling.

That nextbus site looks really nice. We were (and still are) considering putting in a 'next bus due' for each bus number on Bustle as long as it doesn't overcomplicate the simplicity we intended from the start. Perhaps nextbus was inspired after seeing Bustle but the timing is probably just a coincidence. The more of this sort of stuff, the better.

PadraigK

Hey Guys,

I'm the developer behind nextbus.ie — let me know if you have any thoughts about it. It's great to see a couple of different approaches to cleaning up Dublin Bus' excuse for a website!

Displaying multiple routes together is a great idea. we had been thinking about this since if your area is well served by Dublin Bus, chances are that you can get any of 5 different bus routes, so you just want to know when the next one is. I also built an iPhone app for this — I won't link to it here cause I don't want to be accused of advertising, but it's pretty straightforward to find in the App Store if you're interested.

There's also justroutes.com and mkmap.com/dublin if you're interested in routes rather than times.

All the best.

Pádraig