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RobinL • today at 11:11 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Author here. Wasn't expecting this to blow up!

This is a quick prototype, made for my 7yo who loves buses.

A few tips:

- Click the freeze icon to be able to zoom and pan without it changing the location of the lens

- Double click to position the lens

Thanks for feedback about the data. The bus stop and route data comes from the Department for Transport’s Bus Open Data Service (BODS), using the national GTFS feed. It seems some things like Manchester metro creep in.

All these caveats aside, as soon as I got this working it felt like a promising direction. I will pay attention to everyone's comments and suggestions and iterate! Thank you!

Incidentally there's a bunch of other free stuff I built for my 7yo on the root domain

Replies

bazzargh • today at 12:04 PM

It'd be nice to be able to permalink to the view for a specific location

While that'd be useful for things like telling someone else what buses they can get, planning a trip, etc, what I actually tried to do was to link to the Killermont Street bus station in Glasgow; Aztec Camera had a sentimental song about late night departures from there - leaving your friends and heading south to look for work - that runs:

    As the ships and the steel
    Slip away to the cry of "Compete"
    There's a message for us
    We can get there by bus
    From Killermont Street
And indeed you can...buses all over the place. But I can't link to it :)
tyxcho • today at 12:01 PM

it's showing a lot of rail/etc. replacement bus routes, which I wouldn't consider typical as they (hopefully) only run very rarely - such as the "DLR" replacement bus route, and "RB1" replacement bus route for the thames clipper in london

modernerd • today at 11:57 AM

Thanks for this! Really fascinating to see how coverage differs.

I expected the UX to work more like:

- Freeze is on by default (or there is no concept of 'freeze'). I can just move around without my screen turning to a lightning strike of random routes.

- Click once to position the search lens.

RobinL • today at 11:23 AM

Also shout out to https://bustimes.org/map which is a less fun but more informative version of this. My son has spent many a happy hour on this site