Yesterday the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) launched Scotty, a new public transport routing application. It covers Austrian city transport systems, bus lines, inland waterway transport and ferries, European railways and most of swiss bus transport. Until the UEFA EURO 2008 in Austria and Switzerland it’ll include 100% of Swiss and Austrian public transport (Graz and bus lines in Tyrol still need to be added).
The database works pretty impressive: you enter start and end address, Scotty returns the closest public transport stations (including walking distance) and finds the fastest route through all possible public transport systems (including public and private busses, railways, subways, trams, ferries, etc.). I think it’s pretty impressive to combine all that information and data sources from various operators and companies into one single application. That’s probably the most difficult part.
On the output side you get textual information as list where to go and where and when to change the train, bus, etc. Additionally you can open an overview map of your entire route or some detailed maps of station surroundings.
Now here is still some room for improvements on usability and mapping features. In times of AJAX, tiling or vector graphics driven web mapping I would expect a user-friendlier map.
Besides and considering Scotty to support and guide a huge amount of visitors in 2008 some more innovative features would be useful too.
Like reverse geocoding and trigger routing directly in the map for instance: I bet the chance that a visitor can pinpoint his hotel and the places to visit is higher than he is able to spell the german address correctly. Similar to the routing solution on Live Local, which is very well done btw.
