Bus Map

[firstfrost]

I've been playing around with the Google Maps API and teaching myself Javascript (Javascript Lesson One: "there is no here here"), and have proof-of-concept (that is, the routes through 100) for an MBTA bus map (because I never know where any of the busses go).

http://web.mit.edu/boojum/www/Map/

I find that I have really no particular knack for nice-looking UI, so if anyone has suggestions (or CSS files!) let me know.

As far as the actual functionality goes, bug reports and suggestions also welcome. (I can't figure out a good way to allow hitting return to work for the text entry fields without triggering a page reload...)

Comments

[dmaze]

Nifty! How did you get the bus map data? It looks like you have it all as a static JavaScript file, which should work. Feature-wise the two things I might request are an option to clear all the selected routes (easy) and an option to show all of the routes at a given point (probably trickier). You should also feel free to steal ideas/code from my bike trip page which has a kind of similar theme to it.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I'm entering the bus map data from the MBTA PDFs on gmap-pedometer using GMapToGPX. So it's kinda slow (hence only 100).

"Clear all routes" would be a good button to have, though "reload page" does work for that in a pinch, which is why I was lazy and haven't added it. You should be able to show all the routes at a point by clicking to set a marker and then doing "select routes near locations" of some small distance.

I should figure out how to let you put a marker on top of a point, which doesn't currently work because the marker is grabbing the mouse event or something like that.

Your bike trip page was totally cool and inspirational when I saw it; the changing color trails in particular was very impressive. :)

Sadly...

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

The bike page hasn't been Safari-compliant in quite a while, and looks really obviously broken on my machine. Boo! (I feel like it once worked in simpler times.) Whereas the bus map seems to mostly work fine, except I can't quite get "highlight routes near a location" to work right (and of course it's terribly slow due to all that data being loaded).

I wonder if there's a way to make the data load lazily---maybe put the data for each route in a separate file and somehow slurp it in when a given route is displayed. But my JavaScript is basically non-existent, so...