GNOME Maps support for IndyGo directions 🚌

[John Scott]

Greetings comrades,

I figured this would be relevant for the people here.
IndyGo officially recommends Google Maps as the primary way of navigating and discovering routes. Even their apps with other vendors and their website will redirect you to Google if you ask for directions. A software solution is all the more needed because the PDF and print maps such as https://www.indygo.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/route19_2406_Web.pdf only show the "time points", a few of the most prominent time points along a route. The possibility of transfers turns this into the "traveling salesman" problem.

Not all hope is lost however: IndyGo and other transit authorities publish both fixed schedules and real-time status information via the General Transit Feed Specification, an open and standardized file format just for this sort of task. This permits almost anyone who wants to make an application or service to just yank the data dump from IndyGo's website and do what they want. (There are caveats: IndyGo does technically have terms of use for the data and it's hard to tell if it's libre. The assertions seem to pertain mostly to their trademarks and such. The "Restrictions on use" section says frankly "You may use IndyGo Content displayed on the Site," so it seems the terms are actually pretty generous. Note that unlike federal works, the state and city/county are allowed to assert copyright on their works, even those which are subject to public records laws, which seems like a bit of a paradox to me but that's a conversation for another day.)
I believe this is basically how Google does their magic: it's likely that very little coordination was required for Google to start publishing information in the first place. There's still the problem that different agencies publish their GTFS files in different places, so that's where services like Transitous come in: they basically aggregate GTFS feeds from all of the providers they know about and cache it for easier use in applications.

In the draft merge request 440 at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-maps/-/merge_requests/440 a regular developer of GNOME's mapping and GIS stuff has added support for Transitous in particular, which is just what we need! I applied the changes on top of the package already in Debian Sid and attached a screenshot of how beautiful it is: so far so good! Modern GNOME Maps also works beautifully on mobile devices so that's pretty neat. (I'm helping a comrade make an in-car system for personal automotive navigation, multimedia, and other purposes that will most likely use GNOME Maps as well.) In the screenshot I made an artificially-contrived route from Circle Center Mall to Moser with a couple transfers and it seems to be doing a great job! It probably doesn't take into account deviations from the schedule, but I'm working on a couple shell script snippets to work around this 🙃
(Hint for tinkerers: it doesn't use GTFS but peeling apart the REST API for the web-based map seems to be a lot simpler and permits making requests like https://realtime.indygo.net/InfoPoint/rest/Vehicles/GetAllVehiclesForRoute?routeID=19 for example.)

The merge request hasn't been merged so this isn't in distros yet. If anyone uses Debian or a derivative of it (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Trisquel, etc.) I can try to make a patched package for you. Otherwise I'll tell the maintainer about my success and maybe we'll see it in distros soon.

Have fun and eat your veggies,
John

P.S. The lists.cinlug.org server is the only non-malicious email system I know that doesn't support TLS, so I've had to turn off transport encryption enforcement with my mail provider to send this. Since lists.cinlug.org already has a certificate for HTTPS anyway, could this be fixed? You probably want http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html#smtpd_tls_chain_files
-- 
🌐 Homepage https://johnscott.me
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