Wait or Walk

I built a little web app over Spring Break called Wait or Walk. The bus stops at Georgia Tech tell you how long it is until the next bus, but I realized one day that you don’t really care about that information. What you want to know is if it’s quicker to wait or just to walk. So I wrote a tool to answer that question. Wait or Walk calculates the time until the next bus and adds the time it takes the bus to get to your destination, plus time for stops, and then compares that to the amount of time it would take to walk. It uses NextBus to get bus times and an offline Google distance matrix call to get walking and driving times. It will also see if it’s cold or rainy outside and tell you the wait time if you want to stay warm/dry. It only works for Georgia Tech right now, but the idea can be pretty easily extended to other public transit systems, especially ones that are tracked on NextBus. The backend is written in Python using Flask and the frontend is all just javascript.

Code is here.