TransLink Journey Planner with maps

[seangriffin]

I would love to know what people think of this example for an application. It would be most useful to anyone in the forums who lives in South-East Queensland in Australia.

I live in South-East Queensland in Australia, and we have a public transport system known as "TransLink". Here is a link to the TransLink website for more information -> TransLink About us. The TransLink website includes a Journey Planner, and it's become quite a popular tool for locals and tourists (especially in Brisbane) to help them get around town using public transport. TransLink even have a mobile version of their Journey Planner which works on IPhones.

The TransLink Journey Planner allows people to enter start and end locations for a trip (using street address, and suburb, or bus stop name, etc), submit the search, and a number of options are returned which describe verbally how to perform the trip. The issue I have with this is that the verbal results don't show a geographical (map) display of the locations in the trip, so it's quite difficult to understand where the locations are in the results displayed. Quite often I've found myself copying and pasting the locations in Google Maps to see where they actually are (relative to where I live).

I've produced this example of the TransLink Journey Planner using Google Maps, to help visualise the results of Journey Planner onto a map. This example calls the Journey Planner service, and interprets and displays it's response to the user in an AutoIT GUI. This example also comes with geographic bus route and bus stop data sourced from the publically available QROTI website (http://qroti.com).

I'm guessing that one day TransLink will supply it's data to "Google Transit" and this tool will no longer be very useful. But I'm guessing we're still a year or two away from this.

REQUIREMENTS:

AutoIt3 3.2 or higher

INSTRUCTIONS:

Download the source files below and unzip them all to a folder on your computer.

Open the file "TransLink Journey Planner with maps.au3" in AutoIT and run the script.

When the script is run, a GUI is displayed that allows the user to query bus routes, bus stops and trips by integrating TransLink's Journey Planner.

The GUI is divided into four parts:

• The Google Map (left)
• Bus Routes (top right)
• Bus Stops (middle right)
• Journey Planner (bottom right)

Note - all the information presented in the GUI is related to South-East Queensland (Brisbane) Australia.

Filling in the Journey Planner fields (Start Street, Start Suburb, End Street, End Suburb, Date and Time) and clicking "Find" will send a search request to TransLink's Journey Planner. Once the response comes back from Journey Planner, it is displayed in the "Option 1" listbox in the GUI. The user may then click "Show" to display the journey on the Google Map using markers. Hovering the mouse over these markers should display tooltips indicating what each marker is. Red markers indicate the points in the journey where the person must do something (like walk, get on a bus, or get off a bus). Black markers indicate bus stops that a person will pass through whilst on their journey.

DOWNLOAD:

Latest Version - v0.1 (29/06/10)

Source: TransLink Journey Planner with maps.zip

Edited June 29, 2010 by seangriffin

[pierrotm777]

I should like to test your script but i obtain an error !

D:\Program Files\Ride Runner\Skins\Carwings_Dynamic_pm_new\Scripts\GoogleMapsTrack\TransLink Journey Planner\ChildProc.au3(146,29) : WARNING: $sMsg_Rcvd: possibly used before declaration.
        while StringLen($sMsg_Rcvd)
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
D:\Program Files\Ride Runner\Skins\Carwings_Dynamic_pm_new\Scripts\GoogleMapsTrack\TransLink Journey Planner\ChildProc.au3(713,54) : ERROR: _ChildProcReciver(): undefined function.
    If Not IsKeyword($vPar) Then _ChildProcReciver($vPar)
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
D:\Program Files\Ride Runner\Skins\Carwings_Dynamic_pm_new\Scripts\GoogleMapsTrack\TransLink Journey Planner\TransLink Journey Planner with maps.au3 - 1 error(s), 1 warning(s)
!>08:51:28 AU3Check ended.rc:2

Thanks for your help

[C45Y]

I too am getting errors. but clicked continue and the gui shows and whatnot.

Functionality looks awesome. a far bit of development still needed [array size exceptions is the main reason im crashing] but works well, follows my local bus route almost perfectly, (missing the end 3 stops)

But great work! keep working on it and ill definitely be using it.

Ill check out source when i get home.

thanks for this lovely program

[stevenj29]

I think this idea is necessary for all. Maps creation will help to find out anything easily. I also refer stqtransport.com.au  site to do this cause it will help also to get good visitors.