I’ve got a guest post over at Human Transit today! It’s primarily a response to all the people who always seem to be telling me that smartphones are making actual hand-rendered and tangible transit maps obsolete. I argue that quite to the contrary they’re a necessary precursor to such automated trip planning and that google transit has little use for anyone without the holistic understanding that can only be provided by a thoughtfully man-made map.
If you haven’t heard of Human Transit before, I highly recommend the blog. It’s author does a fantastic job of elucidating the choices and tradeoffs involved building a transit system, both in the abstract and with a good variety of concrete examples from around the world. Actually, some of his writing helped inspired me to develop the Cincinnati frequency map a couple years back!
Anyway, check out the post over there and peruse some of the other articles. They’re well worth the read, as (always surprisingly for the internet) are the comments.
[…] most of the important lines and many of the major stops entered now. One result is the first and only web-map1 of transit services in […]