To me at least, public transit and the mobile web could make a very enabling combination. When I’m out on the streets and want to get somewhere, I’d love to be able pull out my phone and bring up a little map showing the route from my current location to a nearby bus or subway stop along with step by step directions on how to get to where I want to go on the transit system – including any transfers and a final walking map to my destination. These sorts of services are very popular in Japan and there are a few similar efforts elsewhere. Transport for London<\/em> has long had a very good trip planner<\/a> although without the maps and walking directions. i-Metro<\/a> is a mobile web rail (bus in a few cities) trip planner that covers an amazing 300 cities worldwide, although the interface and is rather bare-bones and again there are no maps or walking directions. A number of transit agencies also have on-line trip planners, some even with walking maps of the start and destination areas. However, all the ones I’ve seen are rather mobile unfriendly with frames, popups, javascript, large images and maps in pdf or other formats that are rarely supported on mobiles. A trip planner that requires a PC to use is just wrong. I’d much rather pull up transit information on my phone rather than have to plan everything out on the computer first, then print out directions and maps which would become useless as soon a I changed my plans. <\/p>\n
Steve Rubel at Micro Persuasion<\/em> linked<\/a> to an ambitious new mobile transit planner called HopStop<\/em> which currently covers New York, Boston, Washington and San Francisco with planned coverage of Philadelphia, and Chicago as well as expansion of the New York and Washington coverage coverage into Long Island, New Jersey and Maryland.<\/p>\n
HopStop.com has a full-sized web based service but clearly recognizes that transit users are far more likely to have a cell phone available when they are out on the streets trying to get somewhere. There are actually three different mobile HopStop services. There are two SMS services – both of which require that you register on the HopStop website before using them. Once registered you send an email containing your starting point and destination to HopStop which returns an SMS containing your directions. I suppose cost is the reason an email rather than a short code is used, which is unfortunate, most US users don’t even now that they can send email from their phones (and they can’t from some some of them). A variant, available only in New York uses an interactive voice recognition system – you tell the system your start and end addresses and the directions are sent to your phone also via SMS. The third HopStop mobile service is web based and requires no registration, just point your mobile browser at www.hopstop.com\/pda\/<\/a> and you ready to plan a trip.<\/p>\n
Even with the beta warts, HopStop is a already a very useful tool for transit users in any of the covered cities. It displayed beautifully on both my phone’s built in Openwave V7 browser and in Opera Mini. Although HopStop’s routes were sometimes less than optimal, they were always accurate – following them will<\/strong> get you were you are going. I’ve filed HopStop in the
mobile directory<\/a> and YesWap Portal<\/a> under Travel-Transit\/Transit<\/em>. There are several other transit planners listed there as well as a number of real-time transit trackers and online schedules.<\/p>\n
HopStop: cHtml<\/a>
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To me at least, public transit and the mobile web could make a very enabling combination. When I’m out on the streets and want to get somewhere, I’d love to be able pull out my phone and bring up a little map showing the route from my current location to a nearby bus or subway stop along with step by step directions on how to get to where I want to go on the transit system – including any transfers … Continue reading