A website providing real time bus and train information has recently been upgraded.
YourStop is compact, easy to use and displays equally well on both mobiles and desktops. The app’s main focus is to allow user’s find next arrivals at stops quickly and easily. Live predictions are given when available and buses can be tracked in real time. Recently viewed stops are automatically saved for easy reuse and favourite stops can be bookmarked.
While YourStop has been around for some time, it was never pushed in Ireland due to AVL data not being available says owner Paul Harrington. That changed recently with the NTA upgrading their realtime API and in the process providing open access to actual bus locations.
The new publicly available feeds contain both predictions and AVL data for Dublin Bus, Bus Éireann and Go Ahead and predictions for Luas and Irish Rail. Unlike predictions which are sometimes wrong (and can be associated with phantom buses), AVL enables the display of actual bus locations. This in turn instills confidence in a user that their bus is on its way.
In YourStop, users can find stops using three distinct methods. There is a detailed stop search facility and a capability to browse all 10,000 stops on a map. Perhaps most useful though, is the Locate the Nearest Stops button which a user sees when they first enter the site. This marks all stops within 2km of the user on a map. If there are less than 20, the next closest are shown.
A useful feature is a Select Destination drop down box which appears when viewing departures for a stop. This lists all stops in alphabetical order that can be reached from this stop without changing bus. When a destination is selected, departures which do not stop at this destination are filtered out. All remaining departures will stop at the destination and the time at the destination shown.
YourStop is a completely free web application with no advertising. An “Add to Home Page” option should appear when using it. This puts an icon on the screen and when launched using it, the look and feel is similar to native mobile applications. YourStop comes with an introductory video and can be found at https://yourstop.info