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Transit tech

Ever walk by a crowd of people waiting for a streetcar? Yeah, well, they don’t know anything.

Taking the TTC has evolved beyond waiting at stops.

The city’s open data program, which allows developers to play with information like streetcar schedules, has inspired a cottage industry of apps, maps and other ways to track its vehicles. Here are five great ones for your iPhone, Android, regular old mobile phone and laptop.

TTC Subway Efficiency Guide Sean Lerner is the godfather of online transit maps. Back in 2005, Lerner set up a Wiki project to collect tips for a faster TTC experience on his TTCrider.ca site. The result was a downloadable, pocket-sized map full of time-saving tricks like which cars to ride to exit nearest to the escalators. Now that quaint little guide is an Android app. (Free.)

Where Is My Streetcar? Creating TTC maps in your spare time, although a wonderful public service, is ultimately nerd’s work. This web-based app admits as much when it lets you toggle between “nerdy stats” like the speed of the streetcar and the frequency of cars on a given route. As for the question Where Is My Streetcar?, the open-source project answers that quite well on mobile or regular screens. (Free.)

Rocket Radar Local developer Adam Schwabe wears the crown for the best-designed streetcar finder out there, at least for the iPhone. Spin the route finder, which bears a resemblance to the popular Urban Spoon app, and find out how long you’ll be waiting for your streetcar. Schwabe says the project was “spurred on by the near-constant whining about the TTC that was simply the product of a lack of information.” Well, this is a laudable solution. ($1.99 in the App store.)

NextBus NextBus is in a league of its own here, since it’s a San Francisco-based company that manages GPS-enabled tracking of streetcars. Its site isn’t very pretty, but it is a good source of information and is what the TTC uses to track its vehicles. (Use it with the TTC’s mobile site, or on the NextBus site.)

TTC Navigator This fancy piece of work has the most of everything: times, maps, routes and schedules. And it looks spectacular, too. But you’d have to know a bit about the TTC to actually use some of this iPhone app’s features. Like, who searches by bus route? You generally search destinations, no? You’d need Google Transit to figure out which route to take. (Free in the App Store.)

Google Transit And speaking of… , this thing is still the best comprehensive TTC tool in the city. (Free.)

joshuae@nowtoronto.com

twitter.com/joshuaerrett

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