[wal5hy]

Weekend project of a friend and I uses live London Underground tube line status to improve route planning. Its still in a very rough state, but feedback of any kind would be very interesting to hear. Thanks. http://www.livetubemap.com/

[archangel_one]

Nice to have routing that takes live status into account, but it's a bit limited since it only does station->station and doesn't do buses. Often if a line is closed you're better off going to a different, nearby station and walking or taking a bus rather than trying to get to the exact one you normally do.

[wal5hy]

That's a very good point and we want to add that feature. Is the fact that it redraws the map based on the current state of the lines visually useful? I would like to redraw the official tfl underground map

[archangel_one]

Yes, I rather like it. In fact, with the appropriate lines removed, 90% of the time I wouldn't even need it to navigate for me - and it's definitely good for more fuzzy journey planning.

I can't see such a thing anywhere on their website, but in stations TfL often have the inverse; a map showing the closures with the rest greyed out. I've always felt that's the wrong way around.

[wal5hy]

Thanks. We felt for London commuters just the live image of the map would be enough to enable them to visualise their route. And for tourists/infrequent users the added route planning would show them how and why they should take a particular journey. You can also manually open and close stations/lines and get instant feedback on how that effects the planned journey (although this is mainly hidden in the UI)

[mcdowall]

Just a heads up, the schematic Tube map is updated every 3 or 4 months. A member of my team tried mapping the points manually with appropriate curves in Canvas, ultimately it was a bit of a nightmare without the original Illustrator SVG file. It might be a painful task for you.

[mcdowall]

This is great, I'll forward over to the guys working on the replacement to our current Flash version.

The data you are using will be superceded soon with a new API with more rich information at a lot lower latency (don't worry we won't decommission the old one for a long while).

We'll be mailing all our subscribers in the very near future for early access.

[spuz]

Could you explain how this differs from the route planner provided by TFL which also takes into account closures and line status?

[wal5hy]

The key concept which we considered interesting was that the image of the underground map also updates to reflect the current status of the lines. Giving instant visual feedback.