Top all-time · #5935
blog.transitapp.com
Company blog · blog.transitapp.comprogrammingdesign
blog.transitapp.com is the company blog at blog.transitapp.com, writing about programming and design. Since 2021, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 25 times, most often “How We Built the Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps (2016)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog's posts on how Transit App renders transit maps and compresses transit schedules for offline use. Commenters cite them as examples in discussions of transit maps and transit data.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How We Built the Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps (2016)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2023-07-31
- Why we’re introducing subscriptions at Transit (2021)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-08-19
- Transit app is now a bike app, too2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-12
- Transit is now up to 80% better at predicting bus times than transit agencies2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-10-28
- No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-11-13
- We turned public transit into a multiplayer game2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-03
What Hacker News says?
I know of https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... because it was on hn
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f/
on “Roman Roads (2017)”Submitted No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains as a story · 1076 points
HN discussionAt transit app, we built a domain specific compression for transit schedules. So instead of a city like New York taking 100mb, it takes like 5mb or so. This was a couple years back when data was still more expensive, so one of the things it allowed is simply always downloading schedules for offline availability, instead of having to ask the user when and what to download. Here's a write up (sorry for the cheery tone…
Comment linking /how-we-shrank-our-trip-planner-till-it-didnt-need-data-84984ca56663/
on “Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes”Submitted Why we’re introducing subscriptions at Transit (2021) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI was kinda expecting a reference to https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties... but I didn't find any while skimming it, even though the content seems to be very similar
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f/
on “Large-Scale Generation of Transit Maps from OpenStreetMap Data”Submitted Transit is now up to 80% better at predicting bus times than transit agencies as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThe document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app ). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team calle…
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f
on “Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping”Submitted We turned public transit into a multiplayer game as a story · 7 points
HN discussionTheir 2016 post on how they render their lines is really nice and full of cool images: https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties...
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f/
on “Ask HN: What are some cool or underrated tech companies based in Canada?”Submitted Transit app introduces subscription model paid by transit agencies and users as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhen I worked at Transit App, I built a backend pre-processing pipeline to compress transit and osm data in python [1] and also another pipeline to process transit map data in python [2]. Since the Ops people complained about how long it took to compress the transit feeds (I think London took 10h each time something changed), I migrated everything to Pypy. Back then that was a bit annoying cuz it meant I had to remo…
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f/
on “Is anyone using PyPy for real work?”Submitted The megaphone that's making cities better as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSeems similar to Transit's approach: https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/
Comment linking /go-underground/
on “Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network”Submitted How We Built the Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps (2016) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe care taken here to achieve aesthetically pleasing results reminds me of this post about creating nice transit maps in the Transit App: https://blog.transitapp.com/how-we-built-the-worlds-pretties...
Comment linking /how-we-built-the-worlds-prettiest-auto-generated-transit-maps-12d0c6fa502f/
on “The simple geometry behind any road”Submitted Transit 6.0: let's make public transit more beautiful as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted We turned public transit into a multiplayer game as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Transit app is now a bike app, too as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted We Built the Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps (2016) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Public transit ETAs are often wrong. Is there a better way to predict the bus? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Transit app introduces subscription model paid by users (or transit agencies) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Transit app introduces safer bike directions as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted We Built the Prettiest Auto-Generated Transit Maps (2016) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 3-year partnership between LA Metro and Transit App comes to an end as a story · 1 points
HN discussion