Some of the changes

September 9th, 2008 admin

Over the last few days I have begun to put together an upgrade of the MelbTransport site, part of which is moving it away from Twitter as the only interface.

Why?

Basically as they shut down their SMS notification service for users outside the US, Canada, UK and India one of the primary benefits of the service was removed. However given I have built Tweet2SMS I now have my own SMS gateway!

The service will still re-tweet official service interruptions along with user contributed @Replies and Direct Messages. Along with some new feature:

  • Completely new user interface, well ok there really wasn’t one before so now there will be
  • Consolidated news on the front page
  • Register on the site and setup your own profile, on registering you get 10 free messages
  • Purchase SMS notifications at 10c/SMS via Paypal. Basically you pay for what you use, sorry I can’t afford to provide free messages
  • Control when the SMS notices get sent out, by time of day, type and Line. That way you only get the notices you really need.
  • Receive both Connex service interruptions and user submitted notices (submission is still via Twitter) via SMS.

Other features under consideration:

  • Reminders on the last transport of the night by line and day of the week
  • Integration with iTransit
  • Notices by station, basically we are looking to be able to let you know specifically which train on which line is impacted at your station of interest
  • More good stuff!

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Changes are afoot

September 6th, 2008 admin

After a bit of a holiday/break/being lazy I am looking at upgrading the features on MelbTransport. Trying to bring together some ideas I have had over the last year.Basically MelbTransport will be turning into a bit of a social network in its own right. Watch this space for further information.

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Upgrade over the weekend

February 25th, 2008 admin

Over the weekend we had a little upgrade on the Twitter Updates, including one new feature and the return of an old broken feature.

The new feature will have some random MA15+ tweets included about the status of our train services. These are random and should only be in 1 or 2 a day, if that. Several Twits, you know who you are, have been requesting more personality out of the service. Well now you have it. Comments on the blog would be great.

You can now reply to the service again and these replies will be pumped back into the Twitter timeline. In the hope of limiting spam, a throttling factor has been put into the system of one reply every 10 minutes per twit. If it breaks again a whole rethink of the design will be needed.

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Service interuption of our own

November 21st, 2007 admin

It seems that Connex is not the only one with service issues, the MelbTransport twitter bot had to be shutdown last night for misbehaving badly and spamming it’s followers about a 200 times.

The issue was caused by a seemingly harmless reply to @MelbTransport by @SilkCharm which tripped a silly bug. The result was to resubmit the reply back into the Twitter API once for every reply @MelbTransport had receive, about 100. Both the offending bug and associated coder have been taken out the back and suitably punished.  The bug killed, and the coder outed on Twitter.

Once it is confirmed that the service will behave, it will be turned back on.

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6 week update

November 19th, 2007 admin

After 6 weeks of operation we have published almost 600 official transport updates from Connex, more than 10 per day.

If we take out weekends there were 24 working days with almost 25 service updates every day

The latest update has been for a service after 8:40pm, the earliest a 5:30am service with a majority within peak hour travel, probably not a surprise to anyone traveling on Connex.

The worse affected line Sandringham, followed by Craigieburn and Frankston.

One word of caution these figures are not 100% scientific, they do not capture ever services notices on a line, and to be honest some notices are actually restoring already canceled services.

Remember to get Connex service disruption begin by following MelbTransport on Twitter.

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The first 11.5 days

October 22nd, 2007 admin

The Melbourne Transport twitter account has been now running for 11.5 days, we have not yet seen the afternoon peak for today.

So far from the official Connex point of view we have:

  • Seen 229 service interruptions of some sort
  • Over half the service interruptions in the afternoon peak
  • The Sandringham and Frankston lines the worst performing with 28 interruptions each
  • Sandringham is impacted equally as bad in both the AM and the PM, while Frankston seems to only have issues in the PM

This ignores any delays where the service is technically not late, ie it arrives within 5 minutes of the scheduled time.

The service is going to start tracking more statistics over the next few weeks to try and understand what is the real picture with Melbourne trains.

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Welcome to Melbourne Transport Updates

October 15th, 2007 admin

This site has been set up for the sole purpose of keeping Melbourne commuters updated on disruptions in the public transport system.

Right now you can get updates on Connex service disruptions, with more to come.

To get Connex service disruption begin by following MelbTransport on Twitter. If you are using Twitter and see an issue you can broadcast it to all other MelbTransport followers either using a Direct message (private) or just tweet @MelbTransport (all your followers will also see this message).

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