Melbourne Transport - A Labour of Love
I need not go into the many issues commuters face daily with the Melbourne public transport as they are well documented .
As a public transport user in Melbourne, one of my major pain points is not being able to find out how to get to a destination.
I believe it's a problem we have all experienced at one point in time, you need to get to a place in a suburb that you haven't been to or maybe never heard of and the only transport option at your disposal is the "fabulous" transportation system we have in Melbourne. To find out how to get there, you jump on PTV's journey planning website, put in the details for your trip into a very unintuitive interface and you get pretty good directions, only problem is the website is built for a computer and you have a mobile phone, and some of the direction information comes back in PDF format!! If you have an iPhone you are in luck you get to use the PTV iPhone app.
Which if the reviews from the app store and write ups about the app are anything to go by means you are still fresh out of luck.
Building a Journey Planning App for Melbourne
It's all well and good to complain about it all but as Shirly Chisholm once said
"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas."
That philosophy is something that the team - Lyn Nagara, Brendan Graetz and I at Hive believe in.
Our mantra at Hive is to "make commuting awesome", so with that in mind we set out on a journey to do just that and our first step was to create Melbourne Transport.
Our idea is to create an all in one app that would provide you with
Updates on transport delays via Social media feeds
Train/Tram/Bus Timetables
Last week we took the first step to creating a better transport experience by releasing the public beta of Melbourne Transport onto the Google play store.
A small step on our quest to making commuting awesome. A big thank you to all the folks who have supported us on this journey especially Jason from the Sensis API crew, Darcy from York Butter Factory for giving us a space to work out of, Adam Faulkner and Chris Saunders from Blackberry AU and all the cool startup peeps along the way.
We have gotten a great deal of positive response and suggestions so far and we very eager to hear from everyone on ways we can improve the app. You can contact us on Facebook, Twitter, or mail us hello -at- melbournetransport.co, if you would like to be notified when we release to the iOS store please sign up for our newsletter at on our website