crazed monkey » transitmap

Bad transit map redirect due to hosting upgrade

Ian Stevens — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 01:03:05 +0000

On Monday my hosting service moved their servers. Ever since then requests on my site for URLs not ending in a backslash forward to crazedmonkey.nfshost.com. This means that if you access my transit map without including the backslash, the map will refuse to load because of inconsistencies with the Google Maps API key. I’ve opened a related ticket with my hosting service and hopefully they’ll fix the issue. In the meantime, please use the URL which works.

Cease-and-desist letter unlikely for transit map

Ian Stevens — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 06:39:01 +0000

I was mentioned again in the Toronto section of yesterday’s Globe And Mail, this time in an article on the TTC website redesign. I can’t find the link online, but here’s the paragraph:

During the past year, the TTC went from sending a cease-and-desist letter to blogger John Martz for publishing a satirical subway map — renaming stations with irreverent anagrams — to the new commissioner praising the efforts of Web developer Ian Stevens, who used free Google tools to create a GTA-wide map.

It’s great to see such a change at the TTC with only a change in commissioner. I’m hoping that it won’t stop with the website, but will spread to all aspects of the TTC from scheduling to swag.

Toronto transit map in print

Ian Stevens — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:59:11 +0000

As I mentioned the other day, the National Post interviewed me on my transit map. If all goes according to plan, the story should be in the Toronto Weekend section of Saturday’s paper, probably page 7.

Not to be outdone, I just got off the phone with the Globe And Mail, and they’re writing an article on the map as well. I’m not sure when it will be in the paper, but it will probably be in the weekend edition given that the writer I spoke to said she was working on a tight deadline. I’ll post more information as I find it.

Update: Thanks to Rob for pointing out the location of the article in the Globe and Mail, which is on page M5. The National Post story is online as well.

More love for the Toronto transit map

Ian Stevens — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 16:36:48 +0000

I’ve been overwhelmed with the positive feedback for my transit map. The news spread from the Livejournal Toronto community to Torontoist, then to the Spacing wire and Transit Toronto. From there it spread to a slew of other sites, including the CityNews blog. I also just came out of an interview with the National Post, so you can perhaps expect to see a mention in there this weekend. I’ll keep you posted.

As I said, the interest is pretty overwhelming. I’m particularly struck with the disappointment in the TTC for not coming up with something similar much sooner. It’s sad that it took one guy working with a finished product on his laptop to produce something of greater use than the TTC can currently provide with its reams of internal route data. Sure, it’s a complicated system, with over 200 routes, and my map is far from perfect but anything would be better than the information the TTC currently offers.

Stay tuned for more updates. I’m currently working out a way to include user contributions to the map to greater increase its usefulness.

Welcome Torontoist and Livejournal Toronto visitors!

Ian Stevens — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 15:29:42 +0000

Greetings to those visiting my transit map from the Livejournal Toronto community and Torontoist, who describe the map as “the best map ever in the history of … Read more

Toronto transit map now with linking

Ian Stevens — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 04:02:15 +0000

I’ve updated the Toronto transit map to include support for linking. You can now link to addresses as well as link to stations. Just click the “Link to this page” link above the map.

Future Toronto Transit Map features

Ian Stevens — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 22:20:06 +0000

Now that my Toronto transit map contains many of the features I envisioned when creating its predecessor, it’s time to think of new features I would like to add. What follows are whatever features I can think of. Most of these are pretty zany, involving tedious work, but who said a feature request list had to be realistic?

GO Train stations and addresses.
Link generation for a search result so that searches can be bookmarked.
Optional rendering of station names and info on a separate layer.
Listing of adjoining surface routes for each station, with link to the schedule for that route.
Surface routes, subway and train lines on their own layer along with the option to select which layers are displayed.
Clickable bus and street car line markers which bring up the TTC web page for that line.
Clickable bus and street car stops which link to the corresponding page on the TTC website.
Rendering of station entrances.

Of these features, the first five seem to me to be a good combination of usefulness and feasibility. The other three require either large amounts of time and/or the usage of a GPS receiver.

Which features would you like to see?

New tiles for the transit map

Ian Stevens — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 17:44:53 +0000

Based on a user comment on the new map, I have added another zoom level to the Toronto transit map. I didn’t do this before because Illustrator wouldn’t let me export a large enough image to PNG, in this case 13794 by 8192. Instead I exported the image in two parts and collated the resulting images using ImageMagick. The detail on that zoom level is high enough so that the names of side streets are now visible.

In addition to adding the higher zoom level, I also re-rendered the tiles for levels 3 and 5 as the scale on the line strokes was off. Surprisingly, this resulted in a 50% bandwidth savings for the level 3 tiles so they should download a little faster now.

To further increase download speed, I have spread the tiles over four domains based on the recommendations of a study on optimising page load time. Incidentally, Google’s map tiles are also spread out over four domains and I coincidentally chose the same simple algorithm.

Creating the Toronto Transit Map

Ian Stevens — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 13:24:50 +0000

As with my old subway map, the most difficult parts of creating the new map didn’t involve any programming. The hardest and most time-consuming part by far was cleaning the TTC ride guide and projecting it onto Google’s tiles. I made heavy use of Adobe Illustrator for this part, removing the unnecessary bits which Google’s maps already have (streets, street names, landmarks, etc.) and then scaling, rotating and moving the map around so that the routes matched their respective streets. Sure, that should have been relatively simple but it wasn’t. First, Illustrator’s selection tools leave much to be desired. Secondly, Illustrator is a pig. The 1MB PDF which is the TTC ride guide ballooned to over 30MB inside Illustrator, and oftentimes even the most minute transformations took tens of minutes to complete. Even after all that work, the lines don’t quite match up, especially on the city’s outskirts, but it’s good enough.

All this tedious work leaves me with a greater appreciation of the TTC ride guide. The PDF version of that document has been around for at least a decade, and yet a computer I purchased last year had trouble manipulating it. There’s no way the map could have been made manually; it has to be computer-generated.

In addition to being unwieldy on large files, Illustrator wouldn’t let me export the image for zoom level 2 of the map. Apparently it was too large to be saved to PNG. I had thought zoom level 3 would be enough but, as someone was quick to point out, that level isn’t enough as it doesn’t contain names for smaller streets. I’m currently trying to figure out a way around that, although it’s difficult as the image for zoom level 2 will be 13794 by 8192.

Through my work with the Toronto transit map I’ve created a few tools which others will find useful. The first is a simple script to download and collate the Google tiles for a given area into one large image. The second is a command-line tile cutter which uses free software and which has a few more features than the automatic tile cutter for Photoshop. I will be releasing those shortly.

TTC subway map upgraded to Toronto Transit Map

Ian Stevens — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 04:39:04 +0000

About a year ago I played around with the Google Maps API and created a map containing the TTC subway system. It wasn’t intended to be all that useful as the TTC’s own map contains much more information. Still, that didn’t stop my map from rising to the top of the Google rankings for TTC-related searches, resulting in hundreds of visits. A few people sent me emails and comments thanking me for making the map, and it even got a mention in the print version of the June 2006 issue of HUB. I didn’t see much reason for the fuss as the map could have been so much better.

For the past little while I’ve been working on an update, one which makes use of new features in the Google Maps API and which should prove to be even more useful than the TTC’s own system map. This map encompasses not only the subway system, but also the full TTC ride guide, including street car, bus, and train lines. Best of all, the map now has search capability as well as integration with the TTC subway rider efficiency guide. Enjoy.

Many will note, and will no doubt complain, that the map stops just west of the airport and just north of Steeles. I did this to limit the size of the map for bandwidth purposes, and because the lines further north and to the west diverge considerably from the streets on Google’s map. You will notice that even west of the airport the lines diverge. I would have stopped the map further east but felt that I needed to include the airport for the sake of completion. As for those north of Steeles and west of the airport, this is a Toronto transit map. Anything else is just gravy.