Friday, February 03, 2012

Routefriend's new station pages

Megabus' Chicago stop now has an unofficial homepage on Routefriend
Routefriend has just launched station pages for all 4000 stations in our network. This includes pages for every station and stop served by Amtrak, BART, BoltBus, Connecticut Limo, Coach USA's Newark Airport service, Dartmouth Coach, Fung Wah, GotoBus, Greyhound, Megabus, Metro-North, New Jersey Transit, Peter Pan, RedCoach, Shore Line East, Skyline Shuttle, Tri-Rail, VRE and Washington State Ferries. Phew!

Many of these providers, such as Megabus and Boltbus, don't have individual station pages of their own. Hopefully Routefriend's pages can fill that void. We include weather, a map, a picture, popular destinations from the station and nearby stations.

We are also working to include live departure information. You will find live departure information already available for all Metro-North stations (see Grand Central Station) as well as select Amtrak stations (for example, the New Haven Amtrak station).

We hope this makes your travels a little bit easier. If there is more information you would like to see around the stations, reach out and let us know.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Megabus is coming to the South. Routefriend has the coverage.

Megabus is coming to Atlanta

Megabus announced today the launch of a new hub in Atlanta. Their sleek, wifi-equipped buses will serve
Megabus's southern expansion, as seen on Routefriend's Megabus stations map.
You can see all these new locations on Routefriend's Megabus stations map.

There are a ton of Megabus' famous $1 fares available, as well as 10,000 free seats with promo code "ATL10K".

The new service begins November 16.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Introducing Routefriend.com/stations

Find the station locations for all of the providers in the Routefriend system: Amtrak, Greyhound, Megabus, Boltbus and more, with Routefriend's new station maps. The feature is called Routefriend.com/stations.

Here's how it works. First, select your favorite provider from the list at http://routefriend.com/stations.


You'll see a map of all the stations for that provider.


To find a particular station, you can either zoom in on it from the map or select it from the list of stations on the right. For a big provider like Amtrak with lots of stations, it may help to filter by some text. There is a textbox on the upper-right side of the screen. As you type, the stations list will show matching stations.



Click on a station and you'll see what we know about it...its location and its website. You can plan trips to and from the station using Routefriend.com/search, our bus and train trip planner. You can also zoom in to find out exactly how to get to that station. For a lot of providers, this means no more deciphering confusing directions on their websites. (We're looking at you, Greyhound.)

Our only disclaimer is, while we've done our best to have an accurate and up-to-date resource, we're not perfect. This site is intended to be a resource, not a definitive guide, and you should always double-check things before traveling.

That said, we've found this information to be really handy. There's no resource quite like it online. We hope you like it too.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Past press on Routefriend


Cool Websites and Tools [November 8th, 2010] - MakeUseOf - Nov 8, 2010

Math Lover Creates Routefriend - NewsTimes - May 26, 2010

Routefriend Now Available as iPhone App - Daily Norwalk - May 18, 2010

Routefriend - MashTrans - Jan 7, 2010

Norwalk proves itself a draw for growing tech companies - The Hour - Sep 17, 2009

Routefriend Blog lives again

This blog is being resurrected from dormancy. Come here to find out about the coolest happenings in city-to-city bus and train travel. And visit us at Routefriend.com to see the new features being launched.

Friday, October 08, 2010

Routefriend is slowly inching its way into GTFS

Routefriend is an inter-city bus-and-train travel planner, but we are working our way down to the local travel level. Including transit schedules provided in GTFS format will be critical to providing tools for local transit agencies. The past month we've been quietly building a set of tools based on top of GTFS schedules. We'll be rolling them out slowly. Stay tuned!

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

finding the perfect flight search api

I'm hunting for the right flight search api to bring flight results into Routefriend. We've been mainly testing with travelfusion, but many of the search results come up in british pounds. Cleartrip also appears to have a nice one, but with search results in rupees.

The best so far would seem to be Kayak's API, however we hit some bugs in testing. It appears the API is no longer supported...it's not linked from the Kayak labs site anymore.

Microsoft's new search engine, bing, has flight search and an API. I'm not clear yet whether the flight search results are accessible through the API. They are blocked from scraping via a robots.txt exclusion.

Anybody know of other good flight search APIs?