When riders query the En Route trip planner, they get a complete door-to-door itinerary for the best trip. This includes:
Riders also see an interactive map, to help visualize the locations of stops and where the selected bus routes will take them.
All this from a starting point, a destination, and the time they would like to leave. This is the power and convenience of web-based trip planning over conventional schedules and system maps.
Paper schedules become out of date, and web schedules are often inconvenient to read. And they require that your rider be familiar with your transit system and be comfortable reading your schedules. Trip planning removes the uncertainty and answers rider queries in seconds.
En Route supports an arbitrary number of landmarks specific to your area, arranged in an easy-to-use menu hierarchy—all you have to do is provide the data. (And of course, we'll be happy to help you select suitable landmarks.) For instance, your riders can select among different cinemas or libraries to visit. Or simply enter part of the landmark name (e.g. “court house”) in lieu of an address.
In addition to specifying what time they wish to leave (a forward search), riders can instruct the En Route trip planner that they need to arrive by a certain time. “Get me to the office by 8:45am.”
En Route internally assigns scores to different legs of a journey according to the rider's preferences. For instance, most people would rather ride the bus than walk for 45 minutes, so En Route assigns a better score to bus-riding than to walking. But sometimes you really need to get somewhere as fast as possible; En Route will dutifully find the shortest path, even if it involves more walking, when the user instructs it to do so.
En Route is one of the few truly multi-modal trip planners. Riders get a combined itinerary that covers the entire journey—even walking to the best bus stop, or riding their bike there.
(Many other trip planners fall short and only show the first and last bus stops. Some even refuse to operate if there is no stop within, say, ½ mile of the rider's starting point.)
Part of the multi-modal quality of a trip planner means that it must take full consideration of how a rider would walk to a bus stop or transit terminal. En Route actually simulates the walking phase to make sure bus connections are possible, and fully accounts for walking in the final itinerary. That means En Route won't tell your riders to catch a bus when they won't be able to walk to the bus stop in time. Or tell them to wait 35 minutes for a bus when they can walk the rest of a journey in 5.
This is one aspect of En Route's pervasively rider-oriented design—after all, it was designed and implemented by a regular transit user! It has the features your riders expect and accurately answers the questions they have about their trips.
How many times have you come across a dynamic web site and found it so useful that you tried to bookmark the page to come back later? All too often, web programmers will build their application as a stateful black box, requiring that you follow their prescribed process every time in order to get your information: log in from the very beginning, enter your search query, and so forth. In cases like that, your bookmark won't work: at best, you'll come back to the starting page.
En Route isn't like that. Queries are queries (known as standard GET requests); you can see the starting and destination addresses in your address bar when you use our trip planner. That means riders can bookmark results or send them to friends, and get the same results back every time. Just like any well-behaved web site.
One core principle of REST-ful design is to offer well-defined, stateless interfaces to a system from the outside world. En Route already successfully uses this technique for handling special AJAX requests from the web front-end. This design decision also opens the door for integrating the core trip-planning engine with other systems, like your Interactive Voice Response system for handling telephone calls. Or a text-messaging gateway, so that your riders can ask for directions from their mobile phone.
The key to any trip planner is the data. Invariably, a lot of time and money will go into putting high-quality, accurate data into your trip planner—we'll be here to help make that possible. Once you have your data, we'll respect your investment, so we won't try to lock it away in a black box.
En Route is moving towards industry standards for your transit data. Agencies with existing data in Google Transit Feed Specification format will be able to plug it into En Route and go. And while we work hard to stay competitive and keep our customers for the long-term, if the unforeseeable should happen, your data (your investment) won't be locked away in a proprietary, legacy system. Think of it as one of our incentives to keep you happy.
We wrote En Route in Common Lisp, a high-level programming language with roots in the Artificial Intelligence community. Without the power of Lisp, what took a few months could have taken a few years.
This power and flexibility persists in the current code base. Whatever your agency's specialized needs, En Route can be customized accordingly.
In fact, we're still refining the En Route user experience and adding exciting features. Here's one example: imagine that you need to visit three locations. You'll stop by the bank after work for 10 minutes, then spend 45 minutes at the mall, and finally arrive home.
Just as an ordinary trip planner makes riding public transportation much more convenient than sifting through bus schedules and a system map, En Route will make these common scenarios much more convenient than querying an ordinary trip planner repeatedly, chaining together the results.
Let's say you left work at 5:35pm. You'd have to ask an ordinary trip planner for a trip from the office to the bank, leaving at 5:35pm. The trip would take 12 minutes, and you'll need 10 minutes at the bank. You'll have to begin a new search from the bank to the mall, leaving at 5:57pm. That trip takes 23 minutes. Finally, you'd have to search for a trip from the mall to your home, leaving at 7:05pm.
That's hardly convenient.
Instead, how about you directly give your trip planner multiple stops, all at once on the same page, along with the amount of time you'll need at each one? Soon, En Route will let your riders do exactly that, and give them a combined itinerary with the trips for each of their errands listed.
Talk with us today about your agency's requirements and options.