Questions answered

I received a nice response to the email I wrote to Winnipeg Transit and documented in my last post:

Thank you for using Navigo and for taking the effort to express a
concern. I managed to track down why the 18,79 option that you
described was omitted. It was simply due to a missing piece of data.
Navigo uses a list of transfer locations that are optimal, and that list
is missing the combination from 18 to 79 at Corydon and Edgeland. We
will correct this as soon as possible.

In your email you expressed curiosity regarding Navigo's algorithm. It
actually searches through all possible trip combinations. Numerous
heuristics are applied to reduce the size of the search, but these only
eliminate options that definitely would not make the list. This means
that options such as the 18,79 should never be missed. If they are, it
usually means there is a program bug or a data error. Sometimes though,
the issue is just differing interpretations of which options to display.
Navigo presents the quickest total trip, the earliest arriving trip (in
the "depart after" case), the trip with the least walking, and uses
various (tweakable) formulas to fill in the remaining options. These
formulas try to find trips with good combinations of travel time,
walking, waiting, etc.

Feedback from customers is quite helpful in bringing these issues to our
attention, so thank you again.

There had to be a good reason why such a painfully obvious trip didn't show up. There was a real problem and it is now being fixed.

You mightsay that I've increased the amount of useful time for those who travel between River Heights/Crescentwood/Fort Rouge and Charleswood by several minutes. Call me an information age minor hero, if you must. Or, if you're one of those who thing the pace of life is too fast already, you can accuse me of contributing to the problem.

In any case, that was a fun exercise in participatory bus ridership.