The horrors of transit.511.org
If you live in San Francisco, like I do, you often have to suffer at the whims of the SF Muni. Tragically, the very useful transit.511.org trip planner is almost totally useless on a mobile phone (excepting perhaps the iphone, but it is still very heavy), the place it would be most useful. Quickly looking at 511, it seems like the reason its so frustrating on phones (and the web really) is its very complex markup that breaks on most mobile browsers, and its unnecessarily heavy page design.
In response, I decided to start making a Yahoo Mobile Widget for the trip planner. Of course the first step was to look up the 511.org api. Well, it turns out they don’t have an api, which seems insane to me, there app is the simplest front-end on a db, an api would be a no-brainer. So this week in my spare time I worked up a simple api that scrapes the pages at 511.org.
The result of my work is this very simple interface to the 511 site. You can specify JSON or XML as the response format, but please don’t try and make any apps on this api yet, I plan to do more work on this to great a real transit.511.org web service, which is something that is very needed. I might also make a more useful UI on the web version, because
Feedback and suggestions? Leave them in the comments. I am planning on having the widget in the gallery some time in the next couple weeks.
March 30th, 2008 at 1:03 am
I’ve been looking for something like this for a while, thanks! (Except that it seems to be b0rked right now…)
March 30th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Yes, seems very borked, the problem is that 511 does a meta redirect if you don’t type the complete street name (Fillmore St and California St) which I am not handling properly in my scraper. If you want to use it it will work fine if you can give the full street name.
April 27th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
You might be interested in a series of meetings held recently:
http://headwayblog.com/category/san-francisco/