The other week I spotted something strange on my train home – the gibberish looking message on the destination screen of a Melbourne train. So what’s the story here? To be accurate, the message wasn’t complete gibberish – but {“Colour”: “#009639”, “text”: “Flinders Street”} – JSON formatted data for ‘Flinders Street’ and hex colour code […]
If you want to catch a tram in Melbourne then you need a Myki, despite the fact you can’t buy one or top it up onboard the tram. In 2017 The Age highlighted the difficulty this can pose for intending tram passengers, in an article on myki “dead zones” – tram stops where the nearest place to top up your myki is at least a kilometre away. Coincidently I started work on an almost identical project years ago but never finished it, so what better time to polish it off?
Over the years I’ve been using TramTracker on my ancient Nokia mobile phone, until December 2013 when Yarra Trams updated the web version of the service, and rendered it unusable on older devices. As a result, I ended up building my own version:
Last week on March 7 Public Transport Victoria finally released something many Melbourne coders and app developers have been waiting for – a public API to query their timetable data. So how does one go about using it?
