So I’m sick of the mbta website.  It’s unwieldy.  The problem with google’s T schedule service is that I want to find the fastest point in a radial location to another radial location, but it only allows searches for point to point traversal.  With too-exact searches I produce inaccurate results because unlike google maps, I’m not trying to figure out how to get from Cambridge to a specific building at a university, I just want the fastest path to an area around the university.  There are a lot of areas that cannot be pathed because they are not technically roads.

I had a few MBTA results which were different based on whether I wrote Harvard Station, or selected Havard Station from a dropdown.  This was because it was comparing the Harvard Bus Entrance versus the subway entrance.  To you or I, the distance was only 1 minute, but the pathing engine had a difficult time moving out of the bus station and into the subway station part.

I propose that these sorts of websites should be work done by open source and research communities.  What better use of budding computer scientist graduates than to have them improve the pathing engine for the public transportation website.  The great thing about this idea is that other cities could benefit from such open source material.  Once we solve the “transportation scheduling” problem, we no longer need to resolve it.  I am certain there are other areas where open source could merge with the government.

Unrelated Link: Class Math (Posting all my comics from last issue of the northeastern Times New Roman, this is 3 of 6)

This entry was posted on Monday, July 21st, 2008 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.