In the News: TriMet Debuts Open Trip Planner
Though it’s still in the beta phase, Portland’s TriMet Open Trip Planner represents a large step forward for transit passengers who want to use the internet to plan a trip across the city. The planner lets travelers select a starting or ending date and time and then enter the parameters of their trip, which can include:
- Quickest Trip / Safest Trip / Fewest Transfers
- Maximum Walk (incrementally from a tenth of a mile to 30 miles)
- Wheelchair accessibility (Yes / No)
- Travel by Transit / Bus and Train / Bus Only / Train Only / Walk Only / Bicycle Only / Bicycle and Transit
In addition, the Open Trip Planner also reads information from the U.S. Geological Survey Data Set and can tell travelers the ascent/descent of their planned trip, a feature that will be particularly handy for cyclists.
But perhaps the best feature of all is that Trimet’s new trip planner is completely open source, meaning that agencies from around the world will be able to use it, and keep improving it, for free. And 3rd party developers will be able to use it for developing any type of smartphone app they can think up.
To read BikePortland.org’s article on the announcement of the trip planner, click here.
The TriMet Open Trip Planner test site (still in beta) can be found here.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Amy Steinberg, The Fleet Beat. The Fleet Beat said: TriMet debuts new open source trip planner, meaning that transit agencies from around the world will be able to use it. http://bit.ly/bdcJju [...]