Since I was just 11 I’ve enjoyed building websites. Whether it was just a small personal homepage or a website for my youth group, I’d spend hours working on things until I got them just right. Heck, early on I remember hand-writing HTML to type up at school because I didn’t have access to a computer at home. Thank goodness times have changed!
Maybe I’m not writing code by hand anymore, but my passion for the web hasn’t faltered one bit. I’m also a little bit of a transportation nerd (if you hadn’t already worked that out). As a result, for the past few months I’ve been working on a little project to combine the two in my down time – and I feel like I’m finally ready to reveal my baby to the world!
Introducing Tubely
Tubely is a website where users can access information about the London public transportation network – the London Underground, London Overground, DLR and Elizabeth line. There’s live network status, individual line information and even live departure information.
There are more features that I’d like to add with time and one of my bigger ambitions is to eventually add in information from other UK public transportation systems.
Line Information
Every line of the London Transport network is different in it’s own ways.
At present the Line Information screen allows users to select a line and find the following information:
- Live service status for that line
- Upcoming engineering works that may impact their journey
- Line map
- List of stations, their interchanges and their fare zones
Live Service Status
The live service status page pulls information from the TfL Open Data API and reflects the current operating status of each line. Status messages are colour coded based on the current status. Lines with issues will appear above lines running well. Otherwise, lines are organized alphabetically and colour coded to match their line colour on the London tube map.
Live Departures
One of the most useful features I’ve added is live departure information. You simply select your station from the drop down list and you’ll see a list of (up to) the next 10 departures from your selected station including which line, which platform and time until arrival.
Thoughts and challenges
One of the trickier things to navigate in making Tubely has been avoiding any inadvertent copyright issues. Transport for London are notoriously protective of their IP and even usage of the London Tube map requires payment of hefty licensing fees. For that reason, I’ve elected to create my own line maps and diagrams for Tubely until such time that I can justify the expense of licensing the originals. I’ve also been careful to stress that Tubely isn’t endorsed by or supported by TfL in any way.
Simply creating my own London Underground, London Overground, DLR and Elizabeth line map was a massive undertaking – with close to 30 hours put into creating it in Canva of all things. While I’m quite please with how it turned out, I’ve been revisiting it from time to time seeking to iterate and improve it.
The TfL API has also been both instrumental, and a huge headache, in making this website possible. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to getting ChatGPT to help me understand it a little better. As I seek to expand Tubely to cover other public transportation systems I’m sure I’ll run into different API issues all over again. I can’t wait.
I’m still not 100% happy with Tubely – there’s some tweaks to the overall design I’d like to make and I’d like for the different sections of the site to feel a bit more cohesive – but that’s something I can work on with time.
Please, take a peek
I’d be thrilled if you’d take a look at Tubely and maybe leave a comment below letting me know what you think and would like to see next.
