{"id":163,"date":"2006-03-05T08:28:08","date_gmt":"2006-03-05T13:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.elharo.com\/blog\/?p=163"},"modified":"2008-05-28T17:40:42","modified_gmt":"2008-05-28T22:40:42","slug":"mass-transit-directions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/travel\/2006\/03\/05\/mass-transit-directions\/","title":{"rendered":"Mass Transit Directions"},"content":{"rendered":"

As useful as MapQuest and Google Map driving directions are out in the Boonies (i.e. anywhere West of the Hudson, north of the Bronx, or south of Coney Island) they’re rather pointless here in the center of the universe, where:<\/p>\n

A. No one has a car.
\nB. Even if you have a car, you can’t park it anywhere near where you’re going anyway.
\nC. And it will probably take you longer to drive there than to walk.<\/p>\n

In fact, both Google and Mapquest maps usually don’t even bother to show such critical information as subway stations, much less bus stops; forcing most New Yorkers to resort to traditional paper maps most of the time. Thus I was quite pleased to learn yesterday about HopStop<\/a>, a map service that actually works for people who rely on mass transit (and in New York that’s essentially everyone, at least some of the time.)
\n<\/p>\n

Currently it supports New York City, with Boston, D.C. and San Francisco in beta. In my limited tests with New York City, it was quite reliable and knew more about local landmarks than Google, Yahoo, or MapQuest ever have, though still not enough. Jacob Riis Park, Floyd Bennett Field, Alley Pond Park, Fort Tilden, and Breezy Point all confused it. On the other hand they seem to be willing to take user submitted information about landmarks. On the gripping hand, when I attempted to submit Floyd Bennett Field, the form did not appear to work. :-( Still if they can fix the bugs and attract a large enough user base to enter local destinations, this could improve quickly. <\/p>\n

On the downside, the mapping tool is based on Yahoo maps and is virtually unusable. Why anyone still uses Yahoo Maps since Google Maps was released is beyond me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As useful as MapQuest and Google Map driving directions are out in the Boonies (i.e. anywhere West of the Hudson, north of the Bronx, or south of Coney Island) they’re rather pointless here in the center of the universe, where: A. No one has a car. B. Even if you have a car, you can’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-travel","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}