From time to time I come up with some brilliant ideas and out of those brilliant ideas I have managed to create some pretty cool computer programs and other items. Here is a showcase of what I have done so far with my most recent project on top and new ideas down below.
Ongoing Projects
Transit Geek
Transit Geek is my latest and greatest project. There are three goals of this website. Firstly to give me a learning project where I had to figure out how to use the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php) stack on a website. Secondly, I wanted to make it known to the world about all the great resources to transit information that already exist, but may not be known about on the internets. And third, I wanted to discover for myself what all has been done before I go and start creating some duplicate resources for transit information.
Regional Transit Schedules
I became inspired by all the inter-city transportation choices available in the Pacific Northwest, but was disappointed by the corresponding lack of information on how they all connect. Therefore, I organized a series of bus schedules and transfer points detailing how to travel between a number of destinations in the Pacific Northwest. I am still in the process of entering all of the routes, but expect to have all of the routes I know about finished by the end of this month. So far I have covered the all of the routes from Vancouver, BC to Salem, Oregon.
Completed Projects
One Bus Away
In a collobarative project with Kari Watkins and Carl Langford in my Transportation Data class we created this website. The idea behind this site is being able to see where you can go with just one bus. We were able to enter a number of destination types and then find where the nearby bus routes were able to go. From there, we made the website link to the corresponding King County Metro bus schedule. Our data has been deleted from the class server. However, I already have the data on my website's server but have yet to get around to created a page that displays the info.
Created: April 2008
First Time Transit Rider Brochures
In a collaborative project with my sister Karly Siroky, we put together a brochure with all kinds of awesome information helpful to people new to taking public transportation. With a few bits of information, I am able to create a personalized brochure about how to take the bus to work while also giving cost comparisons about taking public transit versus driving. If you want me to make you one of these brochures, click on the link and it will give you some more information. As of right now, I am unable to automatically created these brochures through my website.
Created: January 2008
Bus program for Palm OS
Once I figured out how to write java for the Palm OS, I made this awesome program. The program shows an offline schedule of one bus route on my Palm Treo 700p. Countless times I've checked the schedule right on my phone without having to access the expensive internet or use a bulky paper schedule.
To install the program, here are the steps you need to follow:
- 1. Obtain a device with the Garnett Palm OS (such as the Treo 650 or 700p)
- 2. Download a Java Virtual Machine from here
- 3. Install the JVM on your Palm device
- 4. Download any of the following schedules and install on your Palm device
66 North, 72 North, 72 South, 73 North, 73 South, 306, 312, 372
For now, these are all the routes I have available, but upon request I can make any other King County Metro route available for download from my site.
Created: September 2007
Transit Infromation Kiosk
This is my biggest computer software accomplishment yet. This program runs on PCs (that have a java runtime environment installed). The program allows the user to quickly and easily select a bus stop and view the real-time bus arrival information for all King County Metro operated buses. In this user interface, searching for bus routes and stops is faster than using Metro's website and you can view real-time information for multiple bus stops at once.
Created: February 2007
Amtrak Cascades Google Transit Feed
One night I was bored and decided to create a google transit feed for the Amtrak Cascades. It isn't complete with a shapefile, but in my defennse, that wasn't in the online API at the time. I did email Google this info, but they only accept Google Transit Feeds from transit agencies.
Also, in conjunction with this project, I wrote a computer program that translates a Google Transit Feed into a kml file that can then be viewed on Google Maps. Again, it doesn't have the shapefile, but it's a useful testing tool.
Created: December 2006
Ideas for New Projects
So here are all of my ideas I've got for future projects. These are presented in no order of preference or what I plan on doing next (often times I'll work on something not on this list). I never really know what I want to make next and often times I'll start working on the programs most useful to me or on the ones that are easiest to do first.
Bicycling Trip Planner: I think that I could do this without too much pain if I kept it simple. My idea is to create a network of primary bicycle-friendly routes which would have elevation attributes where the routes intersected so the route planner would be able to find routes with less climbing.
Commute Calculator: The general idea of this is for people to be able to enter their address and then my program would say what the average travel times are to different areas of the city. I might be able to do some of these calculations using UrbanSim or maybe get access to PSRC's travel demand model. I'd also want to show predicted travel times durin rush hour and free-flowing traffic.
One Bus Away imrovements: Firstly, I need to migrate the data onto my website. Then I will work on adding an address search and interfacing with either Yahoo! Local search or Yelp, or maybe both. I'll also try to add a Google Map to show all of this information. On Google Maps I would create a bunch of half-mile circles around bus stops accessible with one bus route.
Pacific Northwest Inter-City Trip Planner: I hope to get this going eventually. I'll include all of my regional public transit options as well as Greyhound, Northwest Trailways, Amtrak, and Washington State Ferries. I'll also make sure that the algorithms I write will be able to show the cheapest routes even when they take longer than Greyhound. Maybe I'll also include some inter-city biking routes as an option. I might mash this up with Google Maps too.
Transit Information Kiosk improvements: I think my next move with this will be moving it to a website viewable on either my Palm or an iPhone. Writing programs seems to be more troublesome than having information viewable from a website. I'd also want to have packages that users could save with the bus routes and bus stops that they frequently use.
Where am I? - Seattle edition: Using the nice street grid system of Seattle I would make a website where people could enter cross-streets and then receive their GPS location which could then be used to find nearby amenities and bus routes.
Some user-created transit/bike route mapping: After spending hours upon hours making the regional transfer page, I began to wonder if just creating the trip planner would take less time than all this. I know that eventually all transit agencies will probably submit their data to some worldwide kind of database. Perhaps I ought to see how it will all play out, but I was thinking of making some kind of Google Map mash-up that would allow users to enter and save transit routes and/or biking routes.