About the Trip Planner
The trip planner is a Web-based tool to help new and seasoned cyclists easily find routes suitable for biking. Routes are confined within geographic regions (a city, county, or group of counties). Currently, the trip planner covers Portland, OR, and surrounding cities; Milwaukee, WI, and surrounding cities; and the city of Pittsburgh, PA. In the future, we plan to integrate more regions and possibly route between regions. The system isn't perfect (yet), but it is steadily improving.
The trip planner is a modern, dynamic, database-backed, Web-based application. By modern and dynamic, I mean that users don't interact with multiple pages that they navigate back and forth through; instead the trip planner is designed to be more like a desktop application.
It does this by using "Dynamic HTML" (DHTML) to dynamically alter the page and Asysnchronous JavaScript & XML ( AJAX) to communicate with the server in the background. In both cases page loads are avoided, which makes the application more responsive and reduces load on the server. We intend to have sensible fallbacks when JavaScript is not available or the available version isn't supported, but this isn't fully implemented yet.
Although the current focus is on a building and refining a browser-based user interface, the system is architected in such a way as to make building other interfaces possible (e.g., desktop and/or command-line interfaces). In other words, the trip planner isn't intrinsically "Web-bound" because the core functionality and user interface are separated into separate modules ( MVC, yo!)
Regions
[Links go to the trip planner with the region preselected.]
- Portland, OR -- Covers Multnomah, Washington, Clackamas Counties (with Clark County in the works)
- Milwaukee, WI -- Covers Milwaukee and surrounding cities
- Pittsburgh -- Covers just Pittsburgh (and is not actively maintained)
