# OMG! Toronto *finally* has a transit route planner


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I must be completely out of the loop. Not only has Toronto finally
gotten a decent TTC (public transit) route planner, of the kind where
you can type in two different intersections or addresses, and it will
tell you what different buses, streetcars and subways you have to take,
but it went live 3 months ago, and I didn’t hear about it until now!

Oslo had this kind of a system back in 1997, if I remember correctly, at
[trafikanten.no](http://trafikanten.no), and I used it very frequently
when visiting the capital, and later when I lived there. So, when
arriving in Toronto in 2004, I just naturally assumed that the TTC would
have such a service. Not true. Back then, even their website was
incredibly fugly - that has improved a lot since then. I was so
frustrated by the lack of a trip planner that I once tried writing one
myself, when I was learning Ruby. I quickly gave up trying to
screen-scrape and parse the data. Then, when Google Transit launched, I
was again super excited, but much time has passed, and it didn’t happen.

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CC BY veggiefrog @ flickr

But one of the things that makes Toronto a great place to live, is the
number of young (and not so young) really committed “urbanists”, whether
it’s the [Spacing crowd](http://www.spacing.ca/), the
[NewMindSpacers](http://www.newmindspace.com/), the people who wrote
[uTOpia](http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/index.php?ISBN=1552451569), or
a host of others, they love the city, and want to make it better. Out of
this group came the transitcamps - unconferences on how to improve the
transit system in Toronto. And out of transitcamp came Kieran Huggins
and Kevin Branigan, who made
[myttc.ca](http://myttc.ca/travel/from/university_of_toronto_at_scarborough/to/st_george).

They did a huge amount of work screenscraping data from the TTC site,
fixing it up into a sensible data format, and creating a great site
around it. Not only can you type in two addresses or intersections and
have the path calculated, with instructions and a Google-map, but their
entire data feed is available for anyone who want to build new
applications on top of it. They also have an [amazing animation of a day
in Toronto](http://www.vimeo.com/1865789), showing all the buses,
subways and streetcars as they move around.

Here is a more detailed [article from the
Torontoist](http://torontoist.com/2008/07/ttcca_meet_myttcca.php), and
the
[](http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/browse_thread/thread/1987b74de41a2719?pli=1)[in](http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers/browse_thread/thread/1987b74de41a2719?pli=1)itial
e-mail announcing the launch.

It can still be improved in some ways, for example it would be nice if
you could search for buildings and places, and not just addresses. Like
typing in from UTSC to Robarts - maybe there could be a Wikipage where
people added places, or what about importing GPS data from Wikipedia
articles about Toronto (if they have them)… They are also thinking of
adding SMS and WAP interfaces, Twitter feeds, and lots of other goodies.

*What I would love to see is the TTC embracing this, giving these guys
some money, and more importantly, lot’s of great data! Sadly, given the
experience we have with the TTC, that’s not very likely, but one can
always hope.*

Stian