ChatNYC is a generally helpful public good initiative that aims to give New Yorkers a chatbot to interface with the city. The first use case is How to get from Rector St and Greenwich St to East 86 and East End ave? - the service should provide transit directions using reasoning and maps of the city - (no algorithms or external apis)
If we can get reliability close to google maps - it should be pretty cool since you’ll be able to do multi-stop, multi-method transit paths such as Get me from X to Y but put a stop for pizza on the way - oh and you can use trains, city-bike and / or ubers, whatever makes the most sense (this is very out of scope for GMaps)
Also a core tenant of this product is that it’s accessible via toll free SMS so u don’t need wifi, data, an account or a credit card.
Kinda works - will turn off data and go get lost downtown tomorrow and see if it’s remotely okay!
P.S. Looking for collaborators (everything OS ofc) to help parse GTFS data so we can do realtime transit i.e. When's the A Train headed Westbound coming to Ralph -> 4 mins
This project is bootstrapped with create-rubric-app.
bun i
bun devOpen localhost:3000 in your browser to see the result.