

Show HN: SFTransit - easy San Francisco transit times - matthewowen

Hello HN,<p>I built www.sftransit.us to make it easier to get live transit arrival/departure times on your cellphone. Right now, it does Muni and BART. You don't have to download anything, and it takes one click to find times for nearby stops.<p>I don't live in San Francisco right now (but am moving out there in a few months). I'm really keen to know if this is a useful service, and to know if there's anything that would make it more useful to you. I'm aware there are a few existing tools for this (like Routesy, and the official site [of course]), but I don't think any are as hassle free...<p>http://www.sftransit.us
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masterzora
I'll have to try it out next time I need to get anywhere (which will be soon)
but just clicking through you appear to have the two things I really need: a
one-click spot for nearby stops of all transit (well, you've got Muni and BART
but that's both a good start and the majority of my transit) and the ability
to save frequent stops. The ability to check buses around a given stop is also
something I've been wanting, though less often.

I don't know if you're planning any of this already but I do have a couple
suggestions based on my current frustrations with nextmuni:

1\. Favourite buses in addition to favourite stops and prioritise said buses
when nearby. I know that 21 and 5 are the two best buses to get me home but
when I'm downtown they often aren't even on the nextmuni's nearby list because
of the density of buses. I'd love to be able to favourite those buses and have
them show up first (or at the very least always show up) if a stop is
sufficiently nearby even if I'm at a stop I don't frequent.

2\. This one would be a bit more of an involved feature and I'm not sure how
feasible it is with whatever dataset and/or APIs you have to work with.
Basically, I want to be able to input my destination and have the site serve
me buses with stops near both end points (if any exist), giving me time
estimates near my current location.

Configuring "nearby" would be handy but far from critical, also.

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matthewowen
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

Number one makes a lot of sense - I'll take a look at that. You're right that
number two is tricky, but I think it's possible to do something good there -
I'll look at it, for sure.

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matthewowen
clickable: <http://www.sftransit.us>

If you're interested, it's built on Python/Flask, redis, geo.js.

