Nightclub Bus-times Idea
by Christopher Gutteridge
My colleague, Toby Hunt, had a cool idea for a use for the live bus-times data; put a screen in a pub or nightclub showing when the next buses from the nearby bus-stops are. More drinking time, and less time spent outside in the cold. For girls travelling home alone, waiting longer than needed at a bus-stop could even be a safety issue.
We are grabbing the data from the council website, and caching it for 30 seconds to try and minimise load on their server. There’s 1410 bus-stops in the bus-stops dataset so in theory the maximum load on their server would be those requested twice a minute. 47 requests per second is rather a lot, but I doubt it’ll ever see 10% of that.