A tool I made for Londoners that makes journey planning quicker

TfL's Journey Planner is a great resource for figuring out the best way of getting from place to place in London.

I've created a tool the speeds up the process. Here's a bit of background...

It can be a bit of a pain to fill in the Journey Planner form every time. Usually, I'm wanting to figure out how to get from my home address to some place and I also always adjust my walking speed to Fast.

One day I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just highlight the destination address on a website, press a button and get the journey planner results without having to fill in all that other info. Or if I could just press a button and get the form already filled in.

My solution was a bookmarklet. A clever little bookmark that dose all the form filling for me.

I later came up with a greasemonkey script that turns post codes on websites into clickable links that show me journey planner results from my house .

I've had both working for a while and wanted to share them with you. The tricky part is that the bookmarklet and the greasemonkey script are customised to me - my home address and my walking speed.

So here's what I've done...

My first web tool

I've created a tool that generates the bookmarklet and the script based on your home post code and walking speed.

Check it out here.

Also have a look at my greasemonkey script that makes logging into twitter a little bit quicker.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 2nd, 2010 at 10:41 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

  • David Laban

    I found this tool using google, but it’s not quite what I want. I am looking for something that’s equivalent to traintimes.org.uk’s bookmarkable route finders (e.g. traintimes.org.uk/cambridge/london) and is okay for mobile use. Do you know if such a site exists?

    I’m thinking something like tfl.stevemould.com/s-p/kgx/e49qt/ (where s-p means station-postcode) which redirects you to the appropriate search results.

    Thoughs?

  • http://twitter.com/MouldS Steve Mould

    Hi David,

    That’s a great idea. I might look at creating something like that.

    In the mean time there are a couple of options that spring to mind…

    First thing is, once you perform a search on TFL you can then bookmark that page and re use it! So long as you didn’t specify a time and date when you did it, it’ll be relevant the next time you click it.

    The second though was that it might be possible to pass multiple variables to a smart keyword search. Though I’ve not been able fine any resources for that!

  • Gareth

    I’m using your tool now, Steve! Great job.
    Gareth from SC.

  • http://blog.stevemould.com Steve Mould

    Thanks Gareth!

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