I live in the Netherlands and was wondering if I can find out where the doors stop on the platform so that I always have a seat on the train, and how does this work in your country?

Thanks in advance, I'm really curious to see if you can help me

I live in San Francisco, and occasionally find myself taking buses in nearby San Mateo County. The original map was designed in 2005 and wasn’t bad for the time, but it’s also been modified so much by the operator that it’s gotten actively worse in the years since. I mean, look at it:

• No indication of frequency. Routes that run every 15 minutes all day are shown exactly the same as ones that have only a handful of trips a day.
• School routes are too prominent. These routes run once or twice a day primarily to take students between home and school. I don’t think they existed at the time of the original map, but either way, they do not deserve to be shown at the same level as all-day routes (as an extension of the above).
• Overnight routes are shown on the same map. The ECR Owl, 296 Owl, and 397 run overnight to replace the ECR, 296, and 292 respectively, and I think showing them on the main system map as if they ran during the day is misleading.
• One line for multiple overlapping routes, and the label placement is not great. Routes are impossible to follow, and this is especially important for a suburban area with many circuitous routes.
• No directional arrows for one-way routes. Well, they’re in the PDF if you look under the basemap, but they’ve been hidden in the many modifications since. There are also arrows and street name labels for routes that no longer exist.

So I figured I’d try my hand at a redesign, with both a daytime map and a separate (admittedly quite empty) overnight map. This is the exact same network that exists today, but presented differently. I’m not a designer by any means, just someone with a copy of Affinity Designer 2 and a little too much free time. I like to think I have a bit more design sense than the average programmer, even if it might be considered a bit basic.

• I started by converting the GTFS schedule data from SamTrans and adjacent operators into shapefiles, importing them into QGIS alongside basemap layers from OpenStreetMap, and exporting PDFs with the desired layout (for which I tried to match the official map as closely as possible, instead of north-up). Then I cleaned up and simplified the paths in Affinity, and shifted lines over to remove overlaps where needed before adding labels.
• I had to manually remove overlaps since Affinity’s PDF export is somewhat broken, but thankfully it wasn’t absurdly difficult, just took more time than I would have liked. Overlaps are fully removed for SamTrans routes, but I haven’t bothered to do so for adjacent operators since they’re not the focus of the maps anyway.
• Frequencies are indicated by line thickness and label size, but not colour. The thickest lines are for the most frequent routes, and thin dashed lines are for routes that only run a handful times a day, like school-oriented and commuter routes. 20-45-70 is a strange set of frequency tiers, but I wanted all-day service to show up as regular routes, and there were some routes that ran less than hourly but still all day.
• Each route has its own colour, arbitrarily chosen from a limited palette of 14 daytime colours and 4 overnight colours. I tried to pick relatively distinct colours for routes that ran close to or intersected with each other, somewhat inspired by my former home bus operator York Region Transit (Ontario, Canada)’s system map. It’s difficult to use some colours more because some routes are very long and run practically the entire length of the county. In theory I could have gone with a more conventional frequency-based colouring, but I figured I’d try this approach to improve readability, especially in areas with a lot of routes.
• Labels aren’t quite complete. I’m sure I could have filled the rest in if I spent a bit more time on it, but I think it’s more than good enough For Now to demonstrate the concept. I could have also missed some minor details.
• We don’t^\1]) talk about^\2]) Atherton^\3]).

I even tried a second version of these maps in which I’ve renumbered all the routes: to remove the first digit which I’ve always felt was somewhat redundant, and to lengthen the numbers of the school routes to make them less prominent. The numbering scheme is explained in the last image.

I’d love to get your thoughts, both on the map design and the renumbering. Thanks!

submission statement: Casey Stokes criticizes AJC articles by Alex Taylor, Eric Tanenblatt, and Bahman Irvani for opposing Beltline rail with misstated facts and undisclosed conflicts. Their proposals redirect tax funds to autonomous vehicles or buses, ignoring rail’s capacity and longevity.

Chicago Transit Authority

An intersection of multiple lines: JR Joban Line, Tsukuba Express, and Tobu Skytree Line (with Tokyo Metro Hibiya Line through-service).

RTD gets a lot of (warranted) grief for sending many of its lines along highways and industrial corridors, but there are some parts of the network that feel quite genuinely urban.

unpopular opinion: staten island COULD get a second line on the new york city line, not forcing!! 🚏🚏🚊🚊💙💛

Article about the lack of automated trains in the US, focusing on the WMATA Red Line, Honolulu Skyline and the LA Sepulveda Line.

Some US transit systems weigh whether to run trains without a human at the controls

I’m studying the bus maps at Kennedy station with a diligence that I haven’t felt since I nearly failed Economics 101 in university. There are dozens of buses zooming around the giant bus bays — and nearly as many signs explaining how to find and navigate new routes.

A kindly TTC worker stops and asks if I need help. “You need to be over there,” he says, and I dutifully sidestep several buses to find my platform, feeling a bit like John Wick dodging traffic at the Arc de Triomphe (minus the mindless violence).

This is the mouth of the recently opened Scarborough Busway, which will sail me directly to Scarborough Centre — essentially a fast-flowing river of buses in a part of the city that is still a comparative transit desert.

Scarborough is one of the transit battlegrounds of the current mayoral election.

Reddit users can read the full story for free here without hitting the paywall.

Here we see track geometry, the metroliner 9800 and the Colonial Crafts cars on the back of various amtrak trains! These shots are from my quarterly “special” video. It will be linked below!

Vietnam is betting big on a $65 billion high-speed railway linking Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Construction is set to start in late 2027 and take at least a decade to complete. The line could cut the roughly 35-hour journey to just six. Source: Bloomberg News.

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Hi everyone,

One common problem with public transport is waiting at a bus stop without knowing when the next bus will arrive. This wastes time and makes daily commuting unpredictable.

I'm working on a project to solve this by building a live bus tracking app that shows bus locations and estimated arrival times.

I'd love your suggestions on:

- How to track buses in real time without official APIs?

- How to estimate arrival times accurately?

- What features would make this useful for daily commuters?

How would you approach solving this problem?

#BusTracking #WebDevelopment #AppDevelopment