If you’re reading this blog regularly, then you might remember reading here about a year and a half ago about how Helsinki Public Transportation is outfitting their buses, trams and metros with GPS devices so that you can track their whereabouts online in real time. For that post I’ve also included a screen grab where you could see a few vehicles moving in Helsinki downtown. Although the map looked a bit deserted, the promise of seeing that map full of movement, seemed wonderful. Back then they’ve promised to outfit all of their vehicles by the end of year 2008. I have paid another visit to see what has happened during this time.

This is a screen grab of the Public Transport Map today.

Quite busy. Now the image actually resembles the dynamic of the public transportation. Since I know there are a lot more buses than there are blue bus icons on this map, it seems that the main emphasis so far have been trams. Or it might have been a strategic decision not to show all the buses. Indeed, the map could become unintelligible had they decided to show all bus action. Everything considered, a very nice improvement. Particulalry when compared to the Web 0.5 attempt at providing a similar service for Ljubljana public transportation.

Besides bringing all those vehicles online, they have also added several very handy features.

First of all, now you can access the information about vehicle arrival times for all of the stops. Which is great. Going to town? Key in the name of your nearest stop, click the stop and voíla, you get a list of all departures for the next half an hour or so. Very convenient.

Besides stops, you can also use the map to look up streets and popular places in Helsinki. Just for the hack of it I entered rautatieasema, the Helsinki central railway station. The map zooms in and becomes chock-full of bus, tram, train and metro stops. There are literally dozens of them. Clicking any shows a real-time list of arrivals. Impressive and functional.

Having GPS in your pocket is great, although most of the time I know where I am and don’t really need it until I go hiking. Now, to know where that bus I’m waiting for is, that is something I want to know. I think that Helsinki Public Transport Map is a fantastic example of converging technologies delivering an entirely new value.

That said, the project is not flawless. Here are some of the things that would be great to see.

Color code the stops. Right now the bus and tram stop icons are almost identical. There’s no easy way to glance at the map. Rather you have to go pixel hunting to tell the difference between tram and bus stops. I know that they are using the standard symbols you can find in the city, but these are of little use on the net where you do not see tram tracks. The user should be able to tell the difference at a glance. The solution is really trivial: color coding. Why not use dark blue for bus stops, dark green for tram, orange for metro and red for trains? And while at it …

Unify symbols. It would be useful if the symbols for all types of transportation would be unified. Now bus and tram look too similar, but metro uses something completely different. Not to mention that for the local trains the bus symbol is used (as you can see in the image to the right) and in some cases for the trams too. It is confusing. Similar look and feel reduces the need to dissect information–it becomes immediately obvious.

Make it finger friendly. Wherever there are a lot of stops in a small area, it is excruciatingly difficult to click exactly the one you need. It can be a nerve-wrecking task to do so with a mouse, and is probably impossible to achieve on your sleek iPhone even with the tiniest of pinkies out there. It won’t cause any fat finger dailing, but is still annoying. Either add another zoom level, or add more space between stations even if their representation on the map should be true to reality.

Remove the Google layer. Since Google powers the map service, Google’s own layer of some tram and metro stops is shown. This does not provide any additional information—it only adds clutter. To add to confusion, the ones Google provides are almost always shown in the wrong location. Go figure. Getting rid of this layer would solve the problem.

Tower of Babel interface. Well, not really, but as it is now, the interface randomly mixes English and Finnish. Why not separate the two completely? And while at it, add Swedish too.

Documentation. The interface and functionality are without a doubt transparent to the developers, but less so to everyone who would find this service useful. Write a brief help. It helps to disambiguate functionality and adds confidence to the user.

I hope that they will address these in the near future. In the meanwhile, I’m looking forward to the next version.

Mladen