Inspiration
Viktor Koves is a Chicago native all too familiar with the nightmares of their public transportation system. With over 200 individual location stops, many issues can and would arise that would pose as an obstacle for his daily commute. He recognized the opportunity for improvement using a WAZE inspired approach to report these obstacles for other daily commuters so that they could avoid the hold-up.
What it does
TransitNetwork is a framework that can implement any GTSF public transportation data into a mobile-centric platform that acts as a community forum where users can report discrepancies in the transportation line for other commuters in the region. TransitNetwork is unique in that the functionality can be applied to any major transportation system that publicly releases its data.
How I built it
TransitNetwork was built with Ruby on Rails, Javascript, CSS, HTML, and SQL.
Challenges I ran into
One of the biggest challenges this project faced was the algorithm used to convert inputted GTSF data into a platform that could accurately report transportation lines, schedules, and locations. This problem was tackled using Ruby on rails and a parsing technique that read and related several large files using RAKE files. We were successfully able to reduce the process to under a minute and seamlessly implemented the data into the mobile platform for the issue reporting functionality.
What's next for TransitNetwork
We hope to expand on the functionality provided by TransitNetwork as a viable form of transportation tracking and reporting. One of the more immediate goals is to implement an API that will allow for real-time rendering of transportation units.
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