Anyone who’s ever tried to find a route on the TTC armed only with the address of their destination will know the frustration of the TTC’s Ride Guide. Available as a big, slow, unwieldy PDF on the TTC’s website, it shows all the transit routes in the city on a map that fails to show all — or even most — street names. If you want to figure out which stations the Bellamy 9 runs between (Warden and Scarbrough Town Centre) it’s fine. To find an address on, say Farmbrook Road on the Bellamy 9 route, not so much. In fact, for finding out how to navigate Toronto by transit, the TTC’s website (including the spiffy new Beta site) is pretty useless — though it is good for finding schedules. Or goodish. As in, at least they’re there.
Enter Ian Stevens, who almost two years ago now, introduced the world to his own TTC map, created as a mashup of Google Maps and the ride guide — which means you can search for an address and get a map showing your destination and the bus, streetcar and subway routes that run to it.
There was some mild fanfare at the time of its introduction, and since then many Torontonians hip to Stevens site — about 18,000 unique visitors a month, Stevens says by email — have relied on it as an essential navigation tool. “It's not much traffic, but it's nice to know I'm helping thousands of people per month,” Stevens writes.
The good news for transit users is that the TTC never sent Stevens a cease and desist order or took legal action of any kind — as they notoriously had done with other DIY transit fans in the past.
The bad news for millions more riders is that the TTC never contacted Stevens to use his maps on their site, as many of us had hoped they might. A “trip planner,” which one imagines might be similar in function, is promised on the Beta site. But for the past two years and the foreseeable future, those not aware enough to bookmark the site or to type “Google Maps TTC mashup” into their search engine are missing out on a valuable tool.
“There are probably more than a few reasons why they haven't [contacted me],” Stevens writes. “Most importantly, the routes are taken directly from the TTC’s own map and manipulated so as to project onto a Google map. It was a brute force way to reach the intended outcome of a searchable TTC map and the results are far from 100 per cent accurate. The TTC more than likely has (or will have, once all their buses are outfitted with upcoming stop info) detailed geo-coded routes from which they can directly produce a much more accurate map with a more professional quality.”
Stevens says the hosting costs are more than covered by Google AdSense ads on his site, though his initial investment of time will likely never be rewarded. At least not directly. “The exposure was well-worth it,” he writes, “as it started me off as a contract software developer. My current clients are The Globe And Mail and a web analytics company with excellent prospects by the name of Crowd Science.”
Happy endings for us then, since his map gets us where we want to go, and, it seems, did the same for him. Now, about the TTC...