When should Tom leave work?

[yesthattom]

There are FOUR, count them FOUR ways for me to get home:

Method 1 and 2: Walk 3 long blocks to the PATH, take it to Hoboken, then either take a direct to Bloomfield or take a train to Broad Street then change trains and go to Bloomfield.
Method 3 and 4: Take the ACE subway to NY Penn Station, then either take a direct to Bloomfield or take a train to Broad Street then change trains and go to Bloomfield.

The first two are $100 less expensive per month.

I’ve always wondered which is the fastest way to get home. It can take me anywhere from 60 minutes to 120 minutes to get home. It is very frustrating when it takes 2 hours. I sit there and fume “was this the best I could do?”

So this weekend I sat down and wrote a program to find the answer. I manually typed in schedules for the NY subway, PATH train, NJ Transit Broad St and NJ Transit Montclair lines. The program can tell you “RIGHT NOW what is the best way to get home?”

Then I revised it to make a table for every minute from 4:30pm to 8:30pm showing what time I would get home depending on which route I took. It turns out my theory is correct: the answer is “it depends”.

However, with my internet-connected phone, I can now view this table and make the best decision depending on when I leave.

Click here to see the shiny new table!

Comments

[kjc.livejournal.com]

Wow. You're a nerd superhero! That's quite impressive!

[geminigirl]

what happens when whatexit goes down?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Un-possible!

[mtnvwpilot.livejournal.com]

OK, then what happens when your wireless provider goes down? I'm sure they're providing 5-9's service, but humor me...

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I was planning on calling you and asking you to surf the NJ Transit web site for me.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

If he has something like a Treo which can have a local web browser, as well as a internet connected web browser, he can save the page on his phone and look at it as long as he doesn't run out of battery juice.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Because I'm lazy, I'd reduce that table to one line:
4:30-4:34, 5:20-5:24, 5:55-6:10, 6:55-6:59
Those'd be the times that, regardless of which route you choose, you get home in less than 1h20.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

You'd do that because you're lazy? Wow! Because I'm lazy I haven't written that code yet.

[ljtourist.livejournal.com]

That's neat!

I think there's a tiny bug, here, though; your routes after 7pm seem to involve time travel. Unless the "Path+Br" option can really get you home at 3:03pm.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's funny.

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I havent proofread the schedule data yet.

[ljtourist.livejournal.com]

No worries, just didn't want you to find out on your way out of the office.

And I do appreciate that you're making the lookup function your habit. That way ifwhen the schedules change, you won't have to change your behaviors. Nice hack!

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Fixed!

That table was what I used to do my initial tests, so I only entered a couple of the entries. Interestingly enough, what you saw as my "infinity" value, which is what happens if you fall off the end of the schedule.

[qwrrty.livejournal.com]

Oh, supercool!

[sweh.livejournal.com]

I generated my train timetable ( http://sweh.spuddy.org/njt.html ) using NJT published data at atisweb.njtransit.com

I'm not sure people are _meant_ to use the data, but if use the NJT website to generate a station-to-station timetable then it shows in the source comments what URL _it_ used to get the raw data :-)

http://atisweb.njtransit.com/cgi-bin/atis81.pl?railline=&mina=0&minb=0&dtime=12%3A00+PM&rtime=1%3A00+PM&fare=N&mm=$mm&dd=$dd&yyyy=$yy&date=$date

is the base URL, and then you need to know the magic station numbers.

I need to rewrite my program to handle interchanges now I commute from Penn via Secaucus

[tim1965.livejournal.com]

I've got the same problem with commutes. Getting from anywhere in D.C. to my home usually takes 50 minutes. Tenleytown to Anacostia metro station is about 30 minutes. It's another 15 minutes on the bus to my front door.

BUT: It seems that Metro has timed Green Line trains to arrive at the half-hour and hour during non-rush. This means that, in order for me to catch my bus, I have to be in the very front of the first car and race up the steps to stop the bus as it pulls out of the Metro station.

If I'm not in time, then I have to wait 15 minutes for the W8 bus. Taking the W8 bus means a 30-minute trip the long way around the route. Or I can wait a half-hour and catch the W6 bus, and spend 15 minutes on the short way around the route.

Either way, if I miss that bus, my 50-minute commute turns into a 90-minute commute.

90 minutes. Just to get from Dupont Circle to the center of Anacostia??????????????????? A person could travel to Fairfax in 90 minutes! They could get most of the way to Baltimore in 90 minutes!

It seems insane. But it's not. "It depends."

[awfief.livejournal.com]

But that can't take into account when the trains are late, or when you're walking slower due to inclement weather (or stopping to look at something cool. :) ) it's all trains, so you don't have traffic issues. However, I have noted that a 10 minute train ride can take 12-15 minutes if there are lots of people, because it really does take longer to get people off and on at each stop when things are crowded.

See, I knit and listen to podcasts, so if I get home late (or get to work late) that's just life. Granted, there are only 3 choices for me, and there's one that's the obvious winner under normal circumstances, and the other 2 would have to have me knowing that a bus was broken down or something in order to take them (sometimes I do because I want to stop somewhere on the way home).

But I'd think the same idea applies -- if you could reduce the frustration/anxiety about the times that it's not your choice to be late, would that be OK? Is it that you're late, or that you didn't plan to be late? Are you frustrated because you didn't expect it to take 2 hours, or because you "could be doing productive things"?

(I could drive into work, and shave my commute in half. However, then I'd be driving in traffic, which would stress me out and leave me not able to multitask. This way, I get almost 2 hours of knitting in per day, and I don't have the stress of driving in Boston).

(then again, NYC likely has a better timing system. In fact, Boston doesn't have timed express trains, nor do they have a location system for trains. When an operator complains he gets stuck behind another train, they make the first train an express one. No kidding. So if it's really just a wrong timing thing, then sure, finding the optimal path is the way to go. But being Zen about it couldn't hurt....)

[awfief.livejournal.com]

for full geekiness, it would only show the current time +/- 5 min. :) That way you'd just load the page, look at it, and go.

[shakal.livejournal.com]

I really, really need to figure out a similar method for my commute which currently involves the USC shuttlebus (taking a variable amount of time on the route between campus and LA Union Station depending on traffic and infrequently, weather) and the Metrolink line to Burbank (which are usually on time).

I doubt my system will be this geekily cool, of course.

I've been defaulting to driving instead of figuring this sort of thing out for days when I'm on a nonstandard schedule, which is Silly.

[circesbed.livejournal.com]

Dude... that's HOT

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

My next steps are to make it a little more interactive.