City
Live GPS tracking of TTC streetcars rolling out on more routes
GPS tracking of TTC streetcars is now available for additional routes. Next vehicle arrival times for routes 504 King, 505 Dundas, 506 Carlton, 511 Bathurst, and 512 St. Clair (beta) are all now available and accessible via the web and mobile phone.
In March of last year, a GPS tracking on number of routes was leaked for a short time, and then revoked from public access pending further development. Until now, only the 510 Spadina and 509 Harbourfront routes were online.
Does this make you happy as a pig in shit, or what? Soon to be gone are the times of hopelessly waiting curbside at streetcar stops with no idea when the next TTC streetcar would be arriving. This will come in particularly handy when it's -25oC in Toronto and shelter can be sought at home or in a nearby coffee shop or store.
Lead photo by sjgardiner, member of the blogTO Flickr pool.
Discussion
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I think it is a waste of resources to spend money on similar systems.
(Welcome to 2001, TTC! How does it feel to implement something that so many other cities / towns have taken for granted? (Hell, I was in villages in Germany in early 2000s that had this on their bus stops)
Umm - 506 "Calton" ? . . .
Beta, i know.
Lack of support in the map plugins for Firefox is an unfortunate omission for this sort of program
Waterloo buses also stop running at around 5pm on Sundays. Doesn't matter if they have GPS if the buses never come.
http://www.nextbus.com/corporate/press/index.htm#ttc
As a professional programmer I can tell you it doesn't cost 10 million dollars to make a website like that. That's insane. What could they possibly have spent 10 million on?
100 GPS transmitters at, say $300 = $30,000.
One slow ass computer for the server = $2,000.
One semi competent programmer putting it all together, say 1 year at $60,000.
One semi competent technician installing the GPS units, say one year at $60,000.
And say, an art school drop out to design one of the ugliest web sites I've ever seen: $40,000
That's $200,000 and change. What did they spend the other $9.8 million on? Even if you triple the labour costs you're still left with 9.2 million.
Even if you quadruple the cost of the equipment you a still have > 9 million left.
This is insane.
All they would need is access to the GPS feed, and I'm sure they could do exactly what the TTC paid 10 million dollars. I bet they could do it in a weekend.
Honestly sounds like a complete rip off, and worse I bet nobody gives a shit, everyone's just happy to finally have 10 year old technology.
for once I must say, very nicely done.
on 506 are all eastbound.
At least people with internet connections wouldn't have to
stand out until a westbound car came by. For some that could be greater than 1/2 hour!.
http://vimeo.com/9357617
I'm not saying it's worth $10 mil, but this is a project that needs to services millions of transit riders well; let's hope to God it's expensive because they're doing design and user testing.
That said, I'd love for the 501 to be included, delays, or not. Knowing when I leave my office, if I'll be able to catch a streetcar in the next five minutes is huge. If it's going to be a half hour wait, I might as well walk down to the King car, or grab a bite to eat.
Almost all of the big cities I've been to don't have it...? What's with the whining?
Incidentally, Kevin has actually designed and built GPS vehicle tracking units (in a former life) ;-)
Where I live the bus service is never predictable.
There is a much more primitive vehicle tracking system on the non-GPS routes, but its output is not reliable enough to use for these types of applications.
the point is, they have a accurate functioning system already in place years ago.
Oh well. Tomorrow morning it's back to wondering if there's a 506 car up at main street station while I freeze my ass at norwood.
Hopefully it'll be back up before November!
I think the only reason they took the other routes down, was to avoid people pointing out even more that there was a 20 min gap.
If I was them, I would be using this data to patch up the gaps before bringing it live again
It's great to hear that its up now for other street car lines, however, it's still showing as only 509/510 for me. Even when I click the link in this article.
Has it been taken down again?
I don't trust the sleeping staff.
I don't trust Giambony either.
Watch out world, I got a car.
took them one year to test 2 streetcar routes and they are still in beta testing
with the speed they move it will be 50 more years before we see all ttc routes on the next bus