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Comment by wal5hy | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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

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.

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)

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.

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The data you are using will be superceded soon with a new API with more rich information at a lot lower latency (don't worry we won't decommission the old one for a long while).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

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

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.

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