Posted by thimabi 4 days ago
If anything goes wrong with a train journey I find it useful to have as much information as possible.
When I was involved with the Green Party we were thinking of “just doing” the things the local government wasn’t doing and I think we set a fire under the bus company’s butt to fix a large number of usability problems that we were going to fix for them (and stick our logo everywhere.)
The bus company was very negative on us extracting schedules from their web site because they wanted to see what people were searching for — hypothetically they could have added new service somewhere if there was demand for it but (1) it seemed hard to believe they’d really do it because changes are so infrequent and (2) they never showed any sign of caring what people thought, why would they start now?
I wrote something similar on a smaller scale for the keihin-kyuukou line in japan: https://rail.esrh.me. Now I live in tokyo and there's several transit options closeby so I would love to have some always on display like this in my room.
Unfortunately, while public transit in the US and Europe seem to be tracked by services with developer friendly APIs, this is not the case in Japan as far as i know -- not that much of a problem back then, i just needed to do some light web scraping.
I wrote all of the scraping/data and processing/frontend code in clojure and clojurescript, and wrote a small blog post about it here: https://esrh.me/posts/2023-03-23-clojure