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Transportle
With increasing population, congestion and ever-present concerns about environmental sustainability, change is inevitable in the way we think about many societal fundamentals. One such fundamental is transport; increasingly, we're becoming aware that we have to carefully consider our travel choices.
Transportle aims to help Victorians make informed decisions about the way they get from A to B - whether it's the daily commute between home and the office, the one-off family trip, or the weekend social outing into the city. Going far beyond a simple mashup of raw data and a Google map, Transportle takes the end points of a user's trip and provides a variety of alternative routes using different transport modes - car, train, tram, bus, cycling, taxi and walking. It then compares these alternatives not just by time and distance, but also in terms of financial cost, carbon emissions and health benefits.
The calculations that go towards establishing these final figures are derived from widely-accepted mathematical models and allow users to customise the equations to their own situation for a more accurate result - students can indicate they travel on concession tickets, owners of SUVs will see how much extra petrol they're guzzling and cyclists can observe how many calories their Sunday ride burns.
Supporting this core comparison are features such as: TimeShift, which allows users to make the comparison extend beyond single trips and properly analyse the difference between routes on a long-term basis; a contextual Points of Interest system which displays locations relevant to the current comparison (for example, bike parks near cycling routes, taxi ranks near taxi paths); and a fully-fledge directions engine.
A number of datasets were used to develop the application, including the Green Vehicle Guide, the Department of Infrastructure's carbon emission database, Open Street Map data, Victorian Government Bike Share data, and the American College of Sports Medicine's energy consumption dataset. As the Metlink Journey Planner does not permit external automated use, Transportle includes its own custom-built public transport route planner based on the Metlink database and a heavily modified A* search algorithm.
Ultimately, we hope that users of the application will be exposed to previously unconsidered travel alternatives in a new way. It's one thing to know in the abstract that your car is a horribly inefficient pollutant-belcher; it's another to see its actual annual emissions generated on your daily drive to work next to the almost as fast cycling route through the park.
Head to http://transportle.com/about/ to get an overview of the features and technology behind the Transportle system before getting started. Or, jump straight in at http://transportle.com - this web application works in all modern browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer). Your first visit should be accompanied by an automated online help system - if you'd like a more comprehensive overview, check out the video at http://transportle.com/about/ .
An iPhone version of the application is in development and the beta release binary is available for download at: http://transportle.com/download/transportle_iphone_beta1.zip . The App My State UDID has been registered - if you'd like an extra UDID registered, email feedback@transportle.com .
The mobile application development platform we're using (Titanium Appcelerator) means that the code written during development of the iPhone application will be easily portable to other mobile platforms such as Android and Blackberry - watch this space!
Comments (42)
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For car & taxi trips, are you able to incorporate the cost of using Melbourne's toll roads?
Cheers,
Michael
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Thanks for taking the time to check out our app! Time taken is worked out simply by distance / average speed. Default values for average walking and cycling speed are 4.8km/h and 20km/h respectively, which our research indicated were reasonably sensible average values. You can change these values by clicking on the relevant transport mode icon in the comparison table, then clicking on the value of the assumed speed in the drilldown tab that appears.
Walking times have been pretty accurate in our experience, but I can understand that city cycling may result in 20km/h being an overestimate for average speed, what with stopping and starting and having to deal with traffic.
Hope this answers your question!
Cheers
Gavin
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Still, great idea - good luck with it
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Mixing cars with public transport is something we hope to be able to do in the future but was too computationally complex to implement in the given time frame with our other commitments; the path finding and route algorithms that we have devised are non-trivial and extending them to mix modes of transport adds an additional layer of complexity. The driving, taxi, cycling and walking modes cover the whole of Victoria, and as I explained before we are looking into integrating the regional transport network.
Thanks again for your critique, however I feel like we are flogging a dead horse here and maybe it is time that you gave some of the other apps some feedback.
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In response to John Peter - we do not currently have regional public transport information in the database. The ticketing structure for these routes is more complex and something that we are still deciding how to integrate into the system. I am not sure why you would want the remainder of the path calculated by car when it is, in a transport sense, the polar opposite of public transport; besides, you already have the car information. The energy burnt in a taxi is less than in a car because you are just sitting in the taxi and not driving, which consumes 1.6 METS (1 MET = energy consumed when resting) off the top of my head. The point of difference between Transportle and Google Maps is that we are not essentially a route planning service, but a transport comparison service that can allow people to make more informed judgments about how they travel.
In response to John Burger - we do not have traffic data that allows us to compute this information. We have experimented with measures such as scaling times dependent on travel time, but without access to the raw data underlying the Google Maps time calculations, there is a lot of guesswork involved so we have left it for the time being.
In response to Lauren, you make a very valid point. We do not have exact parking cost data in the database - where possible we have tried to note where you have to pay for parking and where it is free, but this dataset is incomplete. It would be nice to be able to incorporate parking fees into the costing, as you have said. The Park+Ride entry in this competition appears to have some data so we will see if we can source that.
In response to Fe - all the carbon emissions are based on one person travel. Dividing by two for your two-person car trip should give a rough estimate of your emissions, obviously they will be slightly higher with extra weight in the car but I am not sure if there is any data on this. In a similar sense, the actual marginal emissions cost of using public transport is almost negligible but we have used a standard figure for per head use.
If anyone else has any comments, suggestions or questions please feel free to leave them here or shoot us an e-mail at feedback@transportle.com. I hope you like our app and vote for it! Cheers
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Just looked at and tested the system. Timing was out a bit for driving. Does it take into account the peak traffic delays and traffic lights? ie you could sit at a set of major lights for 5 mins. Otherwise, interesting to see the comparisons.
I think you have a winner!.
John..
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awesome app.... works great for out-of-towners like me too, google maps doesnt give public transport lines... gonna use this instead of google now!
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Should there not be an option for indicating number of people sharing a car and thus calculations can be adjusted accordingly? My husband and I are lucky enough to be working in the same place and use just one car to go to/from work every day.
All the best.
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Awesome stuff. Anything that promotes environmental awareness gets a plus in my book!
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Good luck with the comp - you have my vote!
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Great app but I think it needs a bit of work on some of the calculations. I just sent an email to feedbacfk@transportle.com with a couple of printouts to illustrate my point. Keep up the good work.
Michael.
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Cheers
John
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i would definitely download it...its a handy app for discovering different transportation methods and i like how it shows all the different routes all on the one map. nice graphics too
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Thanks for reporting this bug - it has now been fixed. As we only have public transport data for metropolitan Melbourne available to us at the moment, public transport routes outside Melbourne can't be properly calculated. The getFirst() is null alert popped up when Transportle tried to draw a route on the map that didn't exist. A future bug fix will add some sort of notice to the user that this is why their public transport route generation fails.
Cheers
Gavin
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Thanks for the feedback. Could you please let me know what you entered on the home page (ie, what journey were you trying to compare costs for?). If you have the time to take a screenshot and email it to gavin@transportle.com that would be wonderful.
Thanks again!
- Gavin
