Catbus

If you are one of the two thirds of Canadian cell phone users who do not have a smart phone, you might find yourself late at night at a bus stop, waiting a very long time for the next bus home. If you had a smart phone with a Google maps app or the new STM app, you would probably have checked when the next bus comes, and waited longer inside that warm bar, or at the party where you were.

Sure, you could get the paper flyers of the relevant bus schedules, if you know where to get them, but it's still all very cumbersome. You could also use the phone service of the STM, telling you the next buses for one given stop. But it will only tell you the schedule if you know the 5-digit stop number and bus line - and you'll only find those once you are at the stop, so you still gotta wait there. And you won't find out about other nearby lines and stops.

So at last weekend's Back to School Hackathon, I thought it would be a good idea to try to make life a bit easier for those of us who still have that dumb phone, and developed a simple sms-based application that will tell you the next buses near a given address. You can just text your current address, intersection, postal code or point of interest to

514-600-1287 (that's 514-6001-BUS)***
and it will find nearby bus stops, and give the next scheduled departures.

Try the web-version:

address:
Submit

As you can see, the app returns a very compact result**:

• At the top it shows the time relative to which the schedule is displayed
• It will show a compact name for each bus stop, with the distance (in metres) from your supplied address
• for each bus stop, it will show the buses, together with their direction (W,E,S,N), and the next couple of buses, in minutes relative to the displayed time

The app properly deals with weekend days, holidays, night buses. It will also deal with special characters that show up in the original schedule (">" or "+"). They will be displayed, and usually mean that the bus is taking some alternate route. The system knows 96% of the bus stops (although some might be located incorrectly). and supports the following options:

• the first word can be set of option characters. W, E, S, N will display only buses in the supplied direction, H will display wheelchair accessible buses using '*'. Multiple characters can be used in one word. Example: "WEH 688 Sherbrooke" will show all westbound and eastbound buses, and show handicapped access.
• You can add a trailling "in number", where the number is in minutes. This will provide the schedules relative to a time in the future. Example: "h3a 2t5 in 30" will show buses near postal code H3A 2T5 in 30 minutes.

This application, given the 160 character limitation, naturally does no actual routing. It just gives scheduled departures. You still have to know your lines. This fits the idea that many people do know the routes of buses that are relevant to them, even if their don't know the schedules. This complements the idea of the frequent service network - you know how to get there, but you would like some independence regarding schedules. By making this an sms app rather than a smart phone app, I hope for this to be useful to more people.

Some argue that smartphones are not a game changer for transit. But tools like this should help reduce some of the stress associated with taking buses - the wait at the stop - and maybe will make some travelling a bit more enjoayble.

disclaimer: This is currently beta. The phone number may change. The phone system may not respond at times (in which case try resending your request).

**Update: Due to a recent outage at tropo, the sms service, I changed the system to respond via another service, twilio. So the system will now respond with a different number (which should also accept requests - but it is a US number). Along with this change the format of the response changed to show absolute times rather than relative times.
***Update: After the service called twilio started offering canadian phone numbers with sms support, I have switched over the service to this new number. The old number ((514) 418-0428), should still work for a while.

As posted in Montréalités urbaine and human transit, Montréal now has a frequent network brand. It's called Réseau 10 Minutes max. Jarret at Human Transit has been making the case for frequent transit maps for a while now. The idea is that bus service that runs at high frequency should be marked differently from other bus service, because these lines allow us to travel without looking up any schedule. In this way they are similar to rapid transit (like the metro); we only need a map to plan our journey. And some people tend to memorize them so they don't need any map at all to make basic travel plans through their city. Montreals Réseau 10 Minutes max includes 11 lines with all day frequent service, and another 20 which have frequent service in one direction until 2pm, and frequent service in the other direction afterwards. This service has to run all day at high frequency, otherwise there is no sense of reliability (i.e. not needing a schedule), and the lines are frequent from 6am to 9pm. Inspired by Jarrets blog I have been planning to make a frequent network map based on existing schedules. But the STM was quicker than me, and with their new label saved me the work of scraping all their bus schedules and deciding which service could be considered frequent -- problematic because the STM generally does not seem to believe in fixed interval schedules, so service that is really frequent during some points during the day might be very infrequent at others. In a way this service represents a shift of paradigms away from schedules that are exactly modeled by demand, and towards service that is more easily memorized and can be more easily relied upon. The actual improvement in service might actually be fairly small and mostly during times many people don't travel anyway; but it can create a powerful brand if it is marketed right. That's why it is surprising that there has been very sparse information about it so far, although the schedule is to take effect on August 30th. In particular, there is no map yet. Which leaves me to make a map after all. The shown image is the first draft, showing all metro lines and the all day frequent services, as well as the commuter rail (dotted). I opted for a very abstract view, compatible with the existing metro map and the new corporate design of the STM. With all the names and dots missing, in this minimalistic state, I find the map kind of appealing. But more info should really be added to make it actually useful, and I hope to add

• The 20 one-way-frequent lines (grayed out because they are less reliable)
• The names of the streets the buses are running on
• Dots for intersections
• Possibly little dots denoting every stop -- they are a measure of how fast a service is (many stops make a bus slow)
• A legend

It's not clear whether it's better to mark the streets busses are running on by labelling intersecting lines, or simply be putting the name of the street along every line. Also there is the problem of how to mark the direction of frequency. Thoughts are appreciated.

One of the problems of transit is topography. How can you provide good transit service where the population density is too low? Ideally one would want good service throughout the network, but of course that's not affordable. On the other hand these areas still need access to public transportation. So there will always be a fair amount of transit service running at low frequency. But how can you get people to switch from cars to transit (or more importantly, not switch from transit to cars) if you cannot provide frequent service? Most people will not take the bus to save the planet, but they will if it provides similar (or better) mobility as the car. One way to lose riders to the car is by not providing timed connections. Many services in low density areas are actually feeder lines to more frequent lines, rapid transit lines or commuter trains. If a connection can not be ensured, then the transit agency will lose riders. This seems really obvious, but it's something that some transit agencies fail to enforce consistently, especially across different agencies. Case in point: recently a friend of mine bought herself a house and moved into the suburb city of Laval, just north of Montreal. Naturally I asked her how she gets downtown for work (who wouldn't?), and to my relief I found out she takes the commuter train. She did complain about the bad connection to the bus, which supposedly makes her wait for an hour at the train station all the time -- both the train and the bus are infrequent; they come about hourly. It turns out that the bus often leaves a couple of minutes before the train arrives. This is especially true when going home in the evening. The only short connection during the whole evening is exactly 1 minute, so it's likely that a passenger will still be stranded for an hour. The bus and the train both come about hourly, and the bus has its terminus there, meaning that the connection is important for that line. The graph shows, for every train arrival, when the next bus will arrive and also when the previous bus left. Ideally the connection should always be like in the morning. The other way the wait is not quite as long, but it seems the bus is scheduled to arrive half-way between the trains. To illustrate the issue, it takes the commuter train 30 minutes to get to the suburb station, and the bus another 10 to bring my friend home. If the layover would be 5 minutes, this would mean 45 minutes of travel time (plus some walking). With a 52 minute layover, the travel time is now 92 minutes - more than twice as long. If you assume that the perceived time of waiting is 2.5x the actual time, then going home feels like 170 minutes... This sort of scheduling problem is not just a fluke, it's an example of a larger problem in the Montreal area. According to a recent article in the Montreal Gazette, up to 19 transit authorties and regional/municipal bodies are involved in planning. Additionally, Aéroports de Montreal, which runs the Trudeau airport, is pushing it's own transit agenda to create a non stop rail shuttle to downtown. Currently it looks like their option is going to be chosen, rather than the more integrated plan of the AMT (agence metropolitaine de transport) to create a surface metro in the badly served West Island. With all these agencies, it is no wonder that there are issues with planning, fare zones, and, well, scheduling. Bad schedules in particular are mostly due to organizational issues, not due to lack of actual transit resources. These issues could be solved with more cooperation, without actually having to increase service. For such infrequent service, schedules make or break the whole transit network. And it is supposed to be a network, not just a set of badly connected infrequently served lines. I wonder how many more connections are this bad, and whether an individual can do anything to get this fixed. But in the meantime my friend is being pushed into using the car by transit agencies that do not cooperate.