After my pilgrimage to Finch West last week, it was time to discover Eglinton West through Line 5 LRT on a beautiful Saturday

[jerome@jasette.facil.services]

I’m really happy for everyone living around Eglinton that finally have access to decent transit.

It brought me to a place in the city I had never been. Discovered a beautiful park (Gladhurst Park) and great coffee shop around (Super Coffee) around Mount Dennis. Had great jerk chicken in Little Jamaica

Just can’t stop thinking that Scarborough (and Finch West) got the short hand of the stick with rapid transit stuck at every street light.

[jfmezei@cosocial.ca]

@jerome They didn't get cellular in the underground portions of the Eglington? Has it been announced? are they aware of this need?

Would have expected TTC to tell Rogers this is "subway" and that they had to fit it out. They bought BAI to control the Toronto subway cellular, so they should be forced to fit out the underground Egg-Lington prtion.

[jerome@jasette.facil.services]

@jfmezei they have cellular but the transit app relies on GPS and GPS doesn’t work underground. And the timings in the app were all wrong so I guess they rely on the same bad feed than the next trains LED have

[jfmezei@cosocial.ca]

@jerome If you turn off location services for "transit" it behaves better because you get to tell it where you want it to display times.

the app would use GTFS feed from whoever runs the service (not sure of Metrolinx or TTC). Not sure if they publish "live" schedules/poositions, or just planned schedules.

[jerome@jasette.facil.services]

@EdwinG yeah… sometimes! It stopped working after 2 stops. It’s been hit or miss for me in Toronto.

I like their technology but it just sadly often doesn’t work

[jerome@jasette.facil.services]

@EdwinG I sometimes feel the tech is heavily optimized for Montreal because the engineer live there but they just don’t have engineers in other cities that get to see this feature being imperfect (!)

Interestingly it works better on line 1 than line 5. So I wonder if it’s optimized to certain trains, acceleration/breaking between the 2 lines is so different.

[jfmezei@cosocial.ca]

@EdwinG @jerome something I have never confirmed, but do cell radios transmit their lat/long to phones? This could explain a phone updating its position as it switches cellular from one station to the next, assuming they coded the radios with proper location.

[mware@ottawa.place]

@jfmezei @EdwinG @jerome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS

[jfmezei@cosocial.ca]

@mWare @EdwinG @jerome Assisted GPS will send the almanach (weekly satellite orbit data) and ephemeris (current satellite orbit data). Both are transmitted very slowly by satellites, so a GPS getting them by other means (aka Internet) enables more rapid acquisition of position. But it doesn't provide actual current position.

Wi-Fi adds ability to lookup Wi-Fi hotspot ID in a database to get its location (often inaccurate). Not sure if cell radios send their lat/lon as part of GSM/LTE/5G

[edwing@mstdn.moimeme.ca]

@jerome I think it has to do with the acceleration/breaking/stop. It really needs to be very distinct.

It didn’t work perfectly in Montréal if the satnav starting position was to vague (e.g.: subway in Montréal’s CBD, it would often be 2 stations off).

They have apparently tested it in other cities.

Transit | No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains

Bad service in the subway? Transit's offline motion detection shows where you are between stations, and reminds you when your stop’s up next

Transit (blog.transitapp.com)