RSS feed for real-time road and transit alerts

OK, here’s another tip for getting real-time road and transit alerts while you’re out on the system!

We now have an RSS feed which sends out the latest updates on road and traffic conditions. (Here’s an explanation of RSS.)

You don’t even need a special reader or app or anything — just click on the RSS feed link in your smartphone’s mobile browser, and then refresh the page to get the latest updates.

The RSS feed is linked to our traffic and transit alerts map, by the way. Every time the map gets updated with new info, the RSS feed is automatically updated too.

Again, you can also follow our TransLink Twitter account for real-time transit info when you’re out and about. Or try our other web and mobile resources for real-time info.

Plan your transit trips on your smartphone

The mobile trip planner displayed on an iPhone. Click for a larger view!

Did you know there’s a mobile version of our transit trip planner?

If you visit tripplanning.translink.ca on your smartphone’s web browser, you can access our transit trip planner while on the go.

It can be really handy if you’re out and about, and you don’t know the system well. We added this feature back in December, but I’m not sure that many people know about it!

Just put in the start and end points of your journey, plus the time you want to travel, and it will tell you what buses and trains to take. You can also customize your search, like asking only for wheelchair accessible routes, or no SkyTrain, or others.

Anyway, that’s just one more tool you can use to navigate our transit system. Google Maps for mobile is another transit trip planner you can try—it has fewer options than our trip planner, but is still really good!

Next Bus SMS tip: how to get the times for just one specific bus route

Well, just in time for Valentine’s Day, here is a tip for finding times for your one and only bus route :)

Likely you’ve heard of our Next Bus SMS service already — you text your bus stop number to 33333, and we’ll send you a text message telling you the next six buses arriving at your stop.

But if you’re at a stop where many bus routes pick up, and you’re only waiting for one of them—well, all you need to do is add the route number after the bus stop number.

So, say you’re looking for the next arrivals of the #4 route at the busy Howe and Robson stop downtown (that’s stop #54831). Just text “54831 4″ to 33333!

And if this still makes very little sense to you, check out the video above for a nice explanation of this tip, plus the rest of the Next Bus SMS system :)

iPhone app roundup for Vancouver transit

I’m not sure everyone is aware of all the iPhone apps that can be used to navigate or find out more about Vancouver transit. So I thought I’d put a quick list together, in case they might be handy during the Games period. Here we go!

(Non-iPhone users: we do have many other non-iPhone-centric web and mobile resources where you can get real-time transit info!)

By the way, if you have used any of these, please feel free to share your favourites!

TransLink and Foursquare team up to offer a transit badge!

I’m so excited to announce that we are working with Foursquare, the mobile social-networking site, to put out a special “transit champion” badge for Metro Vancouver!

It’s going to be great fun if you’re using Foursquare and riding transit during this busy Olympic period – make sure you check in and earn your badge on the go!

If you’ve never heard of Foursquare before, it’s a really neat social networking site that makes a game out of exploring your neighbourhood, and it’s got about 350,000 registered users worldwide right now.

You sign in on your mobile device, share your location with friends, and share handy tips or reasons to explore other things nearby. But you also earn points for checking in to locations around the region, and the person checking into a location the most becomes “Mayor” of that location, at least until someone else checks in more!

Our TransLink transit champion badge on Foursquare!

Plus, you can unlock a “badge” for checking into certain types of places – several visits to the gym gets you a “Gym Rat” badge, for example.

In our case, 10 checkins to a TransLink train station (SkyTrain and West Coast Express!) or a major bus exchange gets you the Transit Champion badge! (Tip: you have to be friends with TransLink on Foursquare to see the badge on your mobile device.)

Anyway, Foursquare has been superamazing in helping us put this together, and it’s really great to have a badge for you all to enjoy. We’re so excited to keep on exploring ways to connect with our users through Foursquare! Thanks again to Tristan Walker at Foursquare and the awesome web team at SFBART for helping us connect!

And you can feel free to e-mail in your tips and recommendations to be added to locations through the TransLink page on Foursquare! Or add them yourself too, Foursquare users :)

Route411: another iPhone transit app

Another iPhone transit app for Vancouver users has entered the fray this January.

Route411 is an app developed by fusedlogic inc. of Edmonton, and it provides stop and route info for Edmonton, Vancouver, and Toronto.

(Other apps for Vancouver transit include the TransLink app, iBusVan and the Buzzer blog app — if you’re curious!)

And here’s a little interview with Evan Adnams of fusedlogic to tell us a bit about Route411.

Read more »

A Buzzer blog iPhone app!

The Buzzer blog iPhone app!

Wow – you can now download a Buzzer blog app for your iPhone, created by local developer Mark Larocque! Search for “TransLink Buzzer” in the Apple App Store, or just use this link here.

Mark’s free app pulls the Buzzer blog feed and the TransLink Twitter feed into one very pretty interface. I’m thinking it could be really handy for transit updates during the Games, if you’re looking for a one-stop iPhone-based app.

(Other apps for Vancouver transit include the TransLink app, iBusVan and Route411 — if you’re curious!)

Anyway, it was a lovely surprise to find out Mark had put this app together. I certainly hadn’t been prodding people to get the Buzzer into the App Store, and it’s nice to see the blog is valued enough to warrant its own app.

Mark also kindly agreed to do an interview, so we could learn more about the app and how he put it together.

Read more »

Olympic travel tips: web and mobile resources for transit info during the Games

This particular set of tips is useful for both visitors and current residents! Please pass it along to others who might find this useful!

So far in the Olympic tips series: info on tickets, bike info, Park and Rides, a guide to transit staff, where to find real-time transit info online, and transit etiquette. Let me know if I should add anymore!

This lady is checking for transit alerts at TransLink's Twitter account, or maybe at travelsmart2010.ca. There's so many options!

If you want the latest about transit and traffic during the Games, we’ve got several web and mobile resources where you can look. Almost all will have real-time updates!

Here’s the overview:

• see the transit alerts page (real-time updates, 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.)
• check the TransLink Twitter account (real-time updates, 5 a.m. to 1 a.m.)
• sign up for alerts via text or e-mail
• look at an interactive Google Map on the TransLink homepage, with the latest transportation issues in the region updated in real-time (it’s called the Games Transportation Alerts System)
• use our RSS feed of road and transit alerts
• try our mobile TransLink site, and travelsmart2010.ca (real-time updates will go here too)
• use the trip planner (it will give you transit alerts for your journey)
• the Buzzer blog (for larger updates mostly)

And here’s a little more about all of them!

Read more »

Get your transit alerts by text or e-mail!

Sign up for transit alerts through e-mail or text messaging! Here’s where the signup link is located on our front page (or just click this picture!)

Hurrah – at long last, you can now get customized transit alerts through text-message or e-mail!

We’ve just launched the service, and you can sign up to get your updates through the TransLink homepage (or click here).

You’ll only get alerts about transit services that you’re interested in. When you sign up, you’re asked to register your regular transit trips, which tells the service what specific routes or services you want alerts about. (You can sign up for system-wide alerts too.)

And nicely enough, you can also select which days you want to receive alerts, so you won’t be bothered on the weekend about changes that only matter for you during weekdays.

Quirks and quarks

This is all new to us, so here’s a list of a few quirks we’re currently seeing, plus a few tips based on what’s happening behind the scenes. (And feel free to share any more you discover too!)

Read more »

iBusVan: an iPhone transit app

The iBusVan logo.

Have you seen iBusVan, an iPhone app for Vancouver transit? It’s now using TransLink’s GTFS data feed to power its schedules!

The app is available for $0.99 and it’s the work of Zhenwang Yao, an independent app developer from SFU.

I e-mailed Zhen and did an interview so we could all learn about him and his transit tool — check it out below.

(Also, if you don’t know, TransLink offers its own official iPhone app for free in the App Store. But we do welcome development of tools like iBusVan to provide more info options and features for customers!)

Read more »

Yay: our trip planner gets some big improvements!

The old trip planner (pictured here) will be getting some major improvements!

Note: I’m still on holiday, returning Monday Jan 4!

If all is going according to plan, you should keep an eye out for some great improvements to our transit trip planner today (or shortly thereafter!)

Here’s the list of improvements I’ve been told about:

• The big one: there is now a widget which searches for addresses as you type them into the from/to fields, so you can select your match right away. It also recognizes common contractions such as E or Hwy, etc. This functionality also carries over to Next Bus and Schedule lookup.
• Early in your trip plan, you can now select some trip options, such as minimize walking or no Skytrain or others.
• We’ve added an Olympic Preferred Route option for planning trips.
• For the first time, we will have a mobile Trip Planner that can be used by web enabled cell-phones!
• Alerts and information we know about your planned trip will be shown right in your results, so you can get up-to-the-minute information about what might affect your travel plans.
• The schedule lookup has been revamped so that it all fits on one page and is easily printable.

I’m still away, but feel free to explore and discuss – I’ll get answers for you once I’m back!

Adopt-a-Stop: a proposed user-created web app

Brainstorming for the Adopt-a-Stop web app.

A few people have already caught onto this, but if you haven’t heard yet, we’ve released our transit data online in GTFS format. So now, developers out there can use it to create useful apps for everyone! (A more formal press release will be sent out to promote the data in the near future.)

Anyway, to take advantage of this new data, Karen Fung and Richard Eriksson are proposing to put together a web app called Adopt-A-Stop, and they’d love your feedback and/or support.

Here’s an excerpt from their blog post about the project:

The basic gist? Here in Vancouver, every bus stop in the system has a 5 digit ID, and now we also have geographic information for each stop thanks to TransLink’s recent release of their data in the GTFS. The long and the short of it is:

We want people to be able to find and create stories with their cellphones that are associated with bus stops.

So feel free to check out their original post about the project and let them know what you think. (They’ve also pitched the idea to the Knight News Challenge, a competition rewarding community news and social media experiments — good luck!)

Got any suggestions for the TransLink alerts page?

Screenshot of the current alerts page. Visit it here: http://www.translink.ca/en/Utilities/Alerts.aspx?tab=0

Quick question: do you have any suggestions to improve the TransLink Alerts page?

I ask because I’m going to be discussing it next week at a couple of meetings. There’s an internal list of improvements compiled, but I’d welcome any thoughts you guys might add.

For example, someone once mentioned that the alerts shouldn’t be sorted by date posted but date of service change. (Obviously a good one!)

As I’ve mentioned before, alerts projects are in the works already — for example, subscriptions and e-mail/mobile alerts are currently being worked on.

And caution: super drastic changes probably won’t be implemented, though it’s nice to hear those ideas — development work isn’t cheap!

Two tidbits: Vancouver transit then and now, Next Bus text record

One of the historical transit photos showcased at Miss604.com. Vancouver 1948 – Photo credit: Jack Lindsay.

Two tidbits you might be interested in:

• Rebecca at Miss604.com has a post up showing historical Vancouver transit photos and their modern counterparts.
• We hit a record number of Next Bus texts on September 8 — 35,181 texts! It’s good to see people are using our info services. Here’s a press release with more info and stats.

A few tidbits you might be interested in…

In tidbits today, the Transit Police have released their 2008 Report to the Community.

I have several tidbits on hand that I just haven’t been able to get on the blog in the past few weeks. So here’s a roundup post that has them all in one place.

• Rail Talk #3 is now online! If you don’t know, Rail Talk is a regular web conference hosted by Doug Kelsey, President and CEO of SkyTrain, where he responds to live questions from TransLink Listens panel members on SkyTrain’s current issues. The theme of this Rail Talk is Olympic transportation. (Go here for links to Rail Talk 1 & 2.)
• Our Transit Police released their 2008 Report to the Community a little while back. As Chief Ward Clapham describes, the report shows the continued development and scope of our young police service and the contribution they make to safety and security of the transit system and Metro Vancouver. Chief Clapham says he is proud of the initiatives and accomplishments of the Transit Police staff, particularly during this past year of rapid growth and change.
• The media section of the TransLink website now has its own RSS feed. (And more feeds for alerts and such are coming in phase 2 of development for the TransLink website this year!)