TransitDB: a prizewinning Vancouver transit website

Carson Lam, all dressed up for the Microsoft FTW Ultimate App Throwdown.

At the end of June, UBC computer science student Carson Lam emerged victorious in Microsoft’s FTW Ultimate App Throwdown, a programming contest pitting a student project against a professional one.

What was Carson’s winning project? TransitDB, a super handy implementation of TransLink’s transit data!

Check out the site: you can see bus routes mapped onto Google Maps, the next buses leaving from each stop at a bus loop on a single page, and an RSS feed of current system alerts.

The site is quite prescient—many of its features are actually already being put together for the TransLink website! But we’re still absolutely thrilled to see great developers building great tools to help our customers out, and we’re working to make our data accessible to all developers so they can do even more (really!).

For more, here’s a Q&A with Carson, explaining bit more about TransitDB, the Microsoft contest, and where he and the site might end up next.

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Profile: Tafyrn & Seamora Palecloud, Canada Line construction photographers

A double rainbow over the Canada Line's Operations and Maintenance Centre --- one of the many fabulous photos found at Canada Line Photography.

For Friday, here’s the second profile in a series on Lower Mainland transit enthusiasts — our first was on the Trans Vancouver bus photo archive.

Look up “Canada Line photos” in Google, and the first hit you’ll get is Canada Line Photography, an enormous repository of terrific photographs chronicling the train line’s construction.

There are two people behind the site, Tafyrn and Seamora Palecloud, who were kind enough to do an interview with me for the Buzzer blog. (And I did ask about their unusual names: Tafyrn just laughed, saying, “As you probably know, it’s good practice not to use our real names on the internet.”)

So, here’s the interview, and sprinkled throughout you’ll find some of the Canada Line photos that Tafyrn and Seamora consider favourites—they link back to related pages from the Canada Line photo blog, too.

Tafyrn, Seamora — thanks again so much for helping me put this together!

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Profile: the transit fans behind the Trans-Vancouver bus photo archive

Chris Cassidy, George Prior, and David Lam, the photographers behind Trans-Vancouver. (They're wearing orange vests because the docks made us all wear them for safety reasons.)

For your Friday Buzzer fix, here’s the first in a series of profiles I hope to do with transit enthusiasts from the Lower Mainland.

Poke around the web in search of Vancouver transit info, and you’re bound to come across Trans-Vancouver, an insanely comprehensive bus photo site.

Online since 2004, the site’s neatly organized galleries boast over 1,400 photos of every single bus in the Lower Mainland. That includes almost every ad wrap, heritage bus, and even one-offs like TransLink’s alternative energy test buses, or the time we tried out a double decker bus.

You can’t go through the site without wondering who’s behind it, so I got in touch and did an interview with David Lam, George Prior, and Chris Cassidy, the photographers behind the gallery. (David started the site and has taken about two-thirds of the 1,400 photos—the rest are from George and Chris, who began contributing their photos to the site a few years after its start.)

As you’ll find out, they’re all very young guys who just happen to love buses. I got to meet them in person at the send-off for the retired trolleys in October, and managed to grab some photos of them in action. (Fun fact: at the send-off, the guys told me that they had previously located the retired buses at the Fraser-Surrey docks, sleuthing out the location from just one photo they saw on Flickr. They’d already been down to photograph the buses at the docks, albeit from outside the fences.)

My full interview with David, George, and Chris is below!

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