Enhance Trip Sharing with Entrance/Exit Information

[aaronbrethorst]

The Trip Sharing feature introduced in OneBusAway/onebusaway-iphone#855 is a good first step towards helping users communicate their expected arrival times with friends and family, but it needs another coat of polish in order to be broadly useful. Specifically, the passenger needs to be able to clearly communicate the following pieces of information to the recipient:

1. Where did the passenger enter the vehicle?
2. Where is the vehicle now?
3. Where is the passenger intending to exit the vehicle? (i.e. what's their destination?)
4. When will the passenger arrive at their destination?

User story

Aaron works in downtown Seattle, near the stadium where the Sounders play. Aaron is a soccer fanatic and has two season tickets for Sounders games. When the Sounders play evening games during the week, Aaron's girlfriend, Mika, takes the bus from the eastern suburbs to downtown Seattle to go to the games. Usually, she takes the 550, which always deposits her in the donwtown bus tunnels, but sometimes she'll take another route that has a different destination stop, depending on whether she's coming from work or home.

Mika is waiting at the bus stop for the 545 at the Overlake Transit Center, which she will take to the 5th Ave S & S Jackson St stop. She's looking at OBA on her phone for when the next bus is coming and sees that it will be arriving in 5 minutes. She taps the '...' button for her bus and selects 'Share Trip Status' from the action sheet. The action sheet closes and is replaced by a modal view controller that provides her with a list of stops that the 545 will make on its route. She chooses "5th Ave S & S Jackson St" from the list and taps the "Share" button in the controller's top right corner. An activity controller appears; she taps on "Message"; and then sends the trip sharing URL to Aaron along with a note saying that she's on her way.

Aaron receives the link and message. He taps on the link, which launches OBA on his phone. He is navigated to the "Recents" tab, and then a "Trips" view controller is pushed onto the stack. Aaron sees a map depicting the current location of Mika's 545 bus with a table of stops below it. The map clearly highlights the stop where she's going to board the bus, the stop where she will get off of the bus, and the estimated time for the latter event. The table also clearly highlights where Mika will board the bus, where she will depart it, and where her bus is right now. All stops before and after her trip are de-emphasized because they don't matter for Mika's trip.

Data format

In order to accomodate a destination stop, we will add a new URL query parameter to our deep link URLs. This has the advantage of being backwards compatible with existing client software:

destination_stop_id=<STOP ID>

https://www.onebusaway.co/regions/0/stops/Hillsborough%20Area%20Regional%20Transit_4543/trips?trip_id=Hillsborough%20Area%20Regional%20Transit_300984&service_date=1508817600000&stop_sequence=52&destination_stop_id=Hillsborough%20Area%20Regional%20Transit_4712

Related

OneBusAway/onebusaway-android#17

OneBusAway/onebusaway-android#715

OneBusAway/onebusaway-iphone#855