Since Google so graciously released an API for their excellent mapper last week, I figured I’d take it for a spin. I had written some code to prise nearby stops and bus times from the MBTA’s handy trip planner a while back, and so I decided to glom them together and see what happened. Here’s the result.
Here’s how it works: You pan and zoom around the map until you find an area of Boston you’re interested in, and then click Recalculate Stops. The map will then update to show stops within a half-mile of the center of the map. You can click on any of these points to get the next three times for the routes at that stop. Seems to work for bus, subway, commuter rail, and ferry routes.
It’s vaguely useful for an afternoon’s work, though there are a few quirks:
- Stops which are too close to each other may be impossible to click on (sometimes you can tell because their shadows look darker)–I’d probably have to write some code to combine these into a single marker.
- The same subway line is often broken into separate listings. This is something that the trip planner does, perhaps to get around some sort of database limitation? In any case, this can probably be remedied with more code on my end.
- Other than the subways, each route is listed only once per map, at the nearest stop. This means that even though the 87 might stop in several places within the mile-wide area being searched, you’ll only see the stop that’s nearest to the center of the map.
- There’s no way to jump to a particular address. The Google Maps API currently doesn’t do geocoding, though I could integrate geocoder.us or the trip planner’s built-in geocoder given a little more time.
- Clicking the
Recalculate Stops button isn’t the smoothest thing in the world. My first attempt updated the query automatically when you panned the map, but that made things a bit too jumpy as you panned around to get a better look at the stops and surroundings. Needs more work.
- The iconography and layout could be better.
- I have no official connection with the MBTA, and they could break the scraping code that this depends on at any time. I hope they’ll be more flattered than offended if they find this.
All in all, the Maps API is pleasant to work with, though the way that Google binds API keys to individual directories keeps you from being able to just copy the source files from your test directory to your deployment directory. But that’s the most minor of nitpicks, given that you can dispense keys for all the directories you want. They’ve done a great job, and I think we’re going to see an even bigger wave of new mapping apps in the coming weeks.