Comment on What's your weirdest or most unique self-hosted use case and solution?
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Another idea I haven’t pursued: something that monitors the schedules of local transit (BART trains, and buses) so I can check their ETA’s and locations from a phone browser. There are existing apps and sites for this but they unfortunately suck. They always answer “when will the next bus/train arrive at stop XYZ” which is almost never what I want to know.
What I want is usually either “I’m on the #123 bus RIGHT NOW and want to get off at XYZ, how many more stops do I wait?”, or else either “my friend is on BART and just passed station X, when will she get to station Y where I’m supposed to meet her?”. Anyone implementing anything like that, please take it into account. The transit agencies usually have API’s to get the relevant data.
hansolo@lemmy.today 1 day ago
Oh, yeah, that’s a tough one, but seems workable.
solrize@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
It doesn’t seem so technically difficult if you can get the transit data. The phone GPS supplies your current location for the bus version, or alternatively you can just identify the most recent stop you saw. San Francisco has around 1000 city buses (I looked that up a while back) and you can put fairly precise coordinates, bus number, and route number of a bus into 4 or 5 bytes. So the complete locations of all the buses is around 20K which is less data than the javascript bloat that nextbus.com sends on every new visit. You do want the route maps (from transit agency) and street maps (openstreetmap) but overall it’s not huge.
hansolo@lemmy.today 16 hours ago
Yeah, and things like arrival times could be flipped around, so time until your stop is also just the ETA of that bus to the stop anyway. Just changes to how you slice and dice the same data.
solrize@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
There might be other buses ahead of the one you are on, en route to that stop. You really want the phone GPS and sometimes the bus number, to figure out where you are on the route.