Ottawa Central Navigator

Over the last few years attending Carleton University I must have used OC Transpo’s 560-1000 plus service at least a few hundred times. One of the things that I found myself doing over and over again would be either checking the travel planner right before I left the house, or calling the 560-1000 number of a few stops as I tried to find the quickest route to the O-Train. So after some time I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be great if there was a web-based tool that I could use to check which buses were arriving at multiple stops along with their arrival times?

After searching I did find a similar service provided by OC Transpo on their mobile site. However, this only allowed a search for one stop at a time, and at each stop only five different bus routes could be selected for viewing. This was close to what I wanted, but not close enough.

So I decided to develop a tool to provide this functionality. At first I wasn’t sure it would be possible, as it was all dependent upon the availability of the route data. Eventually I found the GTFS feed for OC Transpo route data. Using the feed data it wasn’t too much work to create some SQL queries to get the correct data, and using some free time I was able to get an alpha version of the tool up and running.

The following summer I decided to redo the project using Google Maps as an interface to the tool. This way, I could provide a graphical interface allowing routes and stops to be seen which were the results of a search. The beta version of the project is currently released, and can be found here. Additional development is still planned which mainly concerns the integration of live GPS data (if it ever becomes available), along with a few smaller features which have been proposed by users. Unfortunately though. Lastly, I’d just like to mention that if you have any suggestions or questions about the site, I invite you to send me feedback about it!