openplans/OpenTripPlanner — Issue #561: visual/textual cues about how itineraries differ
Author: andrewbyrd
Created: 2011-11-10 15:17:40+00:00
State: open
Labels: api, webapp

When giving the user multiple itineraries, it would be nice to explain why each one was chosen. With multi-objective optimization most paths found are clearly better in some way. The various itineraries could be clearly tagged in the web ui with "fastest", "safer", "less hills", "least walking", "least transfers". Superlatives like "much faster" or "much safer" could be used when they beat the other itineraries by more than a certain percentage. This same mechanism could indicate paths containing excess walking or very long transfers.

To allow for internationalization, these relative qualities could be expressed as signed integers that map to (least, less, no comment, more, most, excess).

It is possible to find two biking paths to the destination that have roughly the same weight, but one has more hills and the other is more dangerous. Line width and color could be used to indicate energy expenditure and danger along the path, helping the user immediately distinguish between them. Not only would this be useful in comparing paths, it would help us in debugging (and probably look nice).