Printing TTC Schedules, The Better Way

Last week I printed out the timetable of a TTC bus stop near me and was disappointed with the results. It took three pages and, shudder, was overloaded with white space. Here’s what it looks like:

Ideally the TTC can move to a vastly more efficient printed layout, but in the meantime a little CSS hack will do. Today I spent a few minutes looking at Greenwood Station – 31 Greenwood and have coded some CSS that can be appended to their print stylesheet.

My suggestions:

• Removed the route diagram from the printed version. It consumes vertical space and is not readable as a thumbnail.
• Removed the “Next 3 scheduled buses” block. The full timetable is below, and once printed it’s obsolete.
• Removed inactive tabs (e.g. Saturday, Sunday, Monday) to avoid confusion.
• Set width of time containers to automatic to prevent wrapping

Here’s what it looks like:

And here’s the CSS code (please comment improvements!):

Fun with Google’s Auto Complete

What kinds of questions are our fellow humans asking Google? From the Google homepage, start typing a question (who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.) to see what’s being asked.

To see what teenagers are curious about, start with “can u”. Endless fun. My favourite: “can women get prostate cancer?”

The Education of Single Click

Ever notice how latecomers to the web will often double-click links? In my usability work, I’ve observed this happening countless times. Such activity almost certainly doubles the users risk of developing carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS). It also raises the ire of environmentalists, as it doubtlessly shortens the life of an average computer mouse by half. In order to do our part to curb this dangerous behaviour, I teamed up again with Andrey Petrov to build this simple javascript that aims to strengthen single-click behaviour.

UPDATE: If you are using jQuery or Prototype.js, follow these examples which only affects links. Otherwise use this original version, which affects all double-clicks.

Feel free to propagate in your HTML to end the senseless double-clicking of web links forever!

The Stop That Wasn’t There

I moved to the Danforth area about a year and a half ago and am often waiting at Queen for the northbound 31 Greenwood bus. This is a problematic stop with northbound buses on either side of the street that also lacks a posted schedule for the primary line. Despite repeated requests to the TTC and even Councillor Giambrone over the past 18 months, I have been unable get a schedule posted for Route 31. I sense that I am perhaps not making myself clear, so I have drawn a frikkin’ schematic.

Route 31 is a peculiar stop because the northbound bus waits facing south on the west side of Greenwood, instead of facing north on the east. It does this because it makes the next two rights and a left to get back onto Greenwood. Unless it’s the alternate B line which runs for a few hours a day and appears on the more obvious east side of the street.

On many occasions I have had to inform (and startle) people because they waiting on the wrong side of the street. It boggles my mind that our city spends thousands on glass bus shelters, but cannot manage to equip these shelters with a basic schedule. TTC, please equip at least the main stops on your routes with information about those routes. Not to Deride the Rocket, but how are we to know The Better Way?