More love for the Toronto transit map

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.

  2. Stephen

    December 22, 2006 at 11:40 am

    It’s been awesome to watch the map develop and has sparked much thought. If only the TTC would come to you now about this and buy it… :)

    Good job, great job Ian! Plus the dang thing is USEFUL!

  5. Tom Leslie

    January 11, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    Just found your wonderful map via a link on a friend’s blog. I worked briefly on a similar project trying to build a Google Earth overlay from the TTC Ride Guide, but my graphics software wasn’t up to the last of making a .png file with sufficient resolution to make it anywhere near as clear as your copy. Nice job!

  7. abu abdAllah

    January 31, 2009 at 1:50 am

    this is a great mash-up! i used your map to help me choose a hotel for an upcoming trip — i wanted something with easy access to the Yonge line, and did not care which station really. your site did the best job of helping me — though i did have searches running on various hotel sites on other windows.

    maybe you could market your work to companies like hotels.com, etc., and use it to help public-transit-users-who-travel (PYUWT — sounds bad, i know, but it’s efficient) like me search for hotels, restaurants, whatever, while driving up public transport usage.

    only thing i did not find that i would have loved to have — a mashup integration of expected travel times based on schedule-data. imagine, your map rocks over the TTC official stick-figure-detail map. but if i could click a start destination anywhere on the map, then the first public transport i would walk to (with an average walk speed estimated), the schedule could pop up an expected wait, then i click on connections… more estimates… build a trip on the fly — the same way that google’s regular map service permits adding destinations for driving directions, but here only to add walking and commuting information.

    okay. now i am rambling. upshot: great site!

  8. Hani

    July 15, 2010 at 8:59 pm

    Ian:

    I agree with other users who say TTC should buy your site.

    It is very useful. Whenever I have to go to an area in Toronto that I’m not familiar with I use your map. The TTC site is nowhere as helpful.

    Thanks for the initiative and good work,

    H