Motivation and Philosophy
The aim of hbus.ca is to make bus and ferry travel in Halifax and the surrounding regions easier and more enjoyable, by reducing the time needed to plan trips. Want to go somewhere but wondering how to do so? Our philosophy is that you should be able to get a good answer to that question in as little time as possible. 15 seconds is good. 5 is better.
Technology
hbus.ca was built on top of many technologies, some proprietary, some open source.
The main software that drives this site is called "Routez". It is built on top of the Django framework, with lots of JavaScript code in the front end. The giant map you see is courtesy of the CloudMade Maps API as well as the tireless work of amazing OpenStreetmap volunteers. The actual pathfinding is done via the opensource libroutez library.
Data
hbus.ca uses the official Google Transit feed generated by Metro Transit, with some minor modifications to make stop locations easier to understand. Unfortunately our agreement with them prevents us from sharing this data directly with users-- if you're interested in using this information for a project, please contact them directly. Also, our use of their data notwithstanding, Metro Transit has no involvement with this site.
Transit to Go
Like hbus.ca? Have an iPhone? Checkout Transit to Go, the fast way to location-sensitive schedule information.
Acknowledgements
The site design (HTML, CSS, and icons) was created by the talented Francis Wu.
Additional thanks to Brandon Martin Anderson (of Graphserver), Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan (of MyTTC.ca), and Daniel Haran for their ideas.