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public transport
tongodeon's post about taking the bus prompted me to revisit my own travel arrangements, not least because I spend at least an hour each day sitting in a car between home and work, and it's neither fun, healthy, nor good for the environment. Alas, I'm still somewhat doomed. My options are as follows:
Using either public transport route suffers from three problems: it takes longer than driving, there's a long enough walk involved in either that I'll get pretty soaked when it rains, and there's poor synchronisation between the services - particularly the DART and its supposed "feeder bus". There's also the lesser issue of purchasing combination tickets to cover the services - as best I can tell, there's no such thing as an economical one-day commuter ticket covering rail and bus, for example, despite the fact that they're under the same umbrella management and in theory working towards a common goal. The cycling route would probably be the best option if I ignored my general state of physical fitness and the inclement weather, but it's also the lengthiest of the three options timewise.
I have an entirely separate rant about the difficulty in collating this information; both the DART and Dublin Bus websites are teeming with overengineered interfaces and a complete absence of useful features. You can, for instance, find out which bus routes serve Dalkey, but you have to click through each one to find out which of those services connects with Dun Laoghaire. And don't even think of asking for a multiple-hop chain of services that'll get you somewhere not on a direct route. The DART site, to give them some kudos, has recently introduced a feature whereby you can check for the next train serving the station of your choice in the direction of your choice. No such facility is available on the Dublin Bus website, despite the fact that the information is available in electronic form, since they're offering to send it to you via text message if you like. I'll pass over comment on their notion of a website for the visually impaired.
Upshot being I'm sticking to the car for now. Vroom vroom!
- 59 bus - or 15-20 minute walk - to Dun Laoghaire, followed by 46A to Brewery Road, followed by a fifteen-minute walk to the office.
- 10 minute walk to DART station, followed by DART to Blackrock, followed by 114 bus to Sandyford Industrial Estate.
- Cycle - it's about 8-10 miles, including a steep climb up a half-mile-long hill
Using either public transport route suffers from three problems: it takes longer than driving, there's a long enough walk involved in either that I'll get pretty soaked when it rains, and there's poor synchronisation between the services - particularly the DART and its supposed "feeder bus". There's also the lesser issue of purchasing combination tickets to cover the services - as best I can tell, there's no such thing as an economical one-day commuter ticket covering rail and bus, for example, despite the fact that they're under the same umbrella management and in theory working towards a common goal. The cycling route would probably be the best option if I ignored my general state of physical fitness and the inclement weather, but it's also the lengthiest of the three options timewise.
I have an entirely separate rant about the difficulty in collating this information; both the DART and Dublin Bus websites are teeming with overengineered interfaces and a complete absence of useful features. You can, for instance, find out which bus routes serve Dalkey, but you have to click through each one to find out which of those services connects with Dun Laoghaire. And don't even think of asking for a multiple-hop chain of services that'll get you somewhere not on a direct route. The DART site, to give them some kudos, has recently introduced a feature whereby you can check for the next train serving the station of your choice in the direction of your choice. No such facility is available on the Dublin Bus website, despite the fact that the information is available in electronic form, since they're offering to send it to you via text message if you like. I'll pass over comment on their notion of a website for the visually impaired.
Upshot being I'm sticking to the car for now. Vroom vroom!
no subject
1. DART is the name of the bus service in the State of Delaware.
2. You know, the Paris Métro used to have these consoles -- maybe some locations still do -- where you pressed a button at the station you were at, then you pressed a button at the station you wanted to get to, and a freakin' ANALOG CIRCUIT would light up the route of the lines you needed to take to get to your destination. Why public transit websites as a rule lack this kind of basic capability is beyond me.
no subject
People came up with web versions of the same gadget, just to be nice, in the very, very early days. I remember seeing them around the time of the second web conference, in Chicago.
Those are extra extra cool -- and apologies to anyone for whom this is old hat -- because of the way they are wired, if I remember right:
1. Wire up a variable resistor between each two points directly connected by subway service.
2. Set the impedance of the resistor in proportion to the distance between the two points.
3. When someone picks two points, the switches connect the negative pole to one and the positive pole to the other. Current flows... taking the path of least resistance! The appropriate bulbs light up! SO FUCKIN' Q00L!
(I know the bulbs themselves offer some resistance. I think you could work around that easily enough by setting the resistances right.)
As for web sites offering this, quite a few of them offer a "plan your trip" system now, which attempts to produce an optimal path for you -- taking into account when you want to travel, and on what day, which is beyond the ability of a simple solution like the otherwise coolass analog circuit. I suspect most transit systems that don't already have that feature are holding out for it. And most implementations of it work badly because their database of street locations, which is supposed to let you just enter the addresses you are traveling to and from, is not very complete and often doesn't know what you want. Add to this the fact that you CAN'T JUST PICK A STATION FROM A MAP AAHRGH, and you're completely and utterly stuck in many cases.
I implemented such a heavy-duty trip planning program, once. I parsed all of the Seattle Metro schedules, badly, using Perl because they wouldn't reply to my emails or release any data in a format more friendly than quirky, overlap-happy "tables" of preformatted text. I used Dijkstra's
shortest path algorithm (http://www-b2.is.tokushima-u.ac.jp/~ikeda/suuri/dijkstra/Dijkstra.shtml) to do it. Rather than simply plugging in each station and its connections to other stations, you plug in each "timepoint" -- a particular station where a bus stops, at a particular time -- and its connections to other timepoints. Always forward in time, of course. I also had timepoints for all major downtown intersections taking walking distance into account and so on. It wasn't instantaneous, but the solutions it generated jibed with the experience of long-time transit users like Lori, my office assistant at the time.
It was pretty cool, but the lack of clean data to input into the system made me lose interest in optimizing it. Maybe I should shoot you a copy to use for the Dublin transit systems. Heck, maybe their schedules are in HTML tables that are actually parseable, and we could actually make this useful to humans. Wouldn't that be something.
Tokyo Public Transport
This would have been a godsend in Tokyo. Tokyo is a mess of independently operated light rail stations, where each line is marked with its own maps and its own color-coding scheme. Sometimes the lines and stations are laid out geographically, sometimes they are not, and sometimes each dot actually represents several stations rather than a single station. Occasionally the maps are subtitled in English, and the Japanese character sets are nonuniform which means you can't even say "I'm looking for the station that looks like a little guy running towards a badminton birdie" because the map you're carrying might use a different lettering scheme than the maps on the wall.