Inspiration
Our inspiration for BAMaps came from the official Aggie bus map on the A&M mobile app. Although the A&M app does its job, we believe that we could improve upon its design and add more features to the app. We envisioned a more convenient version of the current Aggie Bus app.
What it does
Our website provides an interactive map that calculates the nearest bus from your current location. You no longer need to manually check every bus route to determine which bus is closest to you. Let BAMaps do the work for you! Just input your location below and where you wish to go on campus and let BAMaps determine which bus stop is closest to you!
How we built it
We used Leaflet, a javascript library to map the bus stop and the user's current location. We also use its pop-up feature to add additional information about the stop. We also use HTML for the layout of the website, CSS to improve responsiveness among different devices, and JavaScript to implement the core logic of BAMaps. We needed all the locations of the bus stops, We accomplished this by scraping it from OpenStreetMap with Python, converting the data to a .csv file, and reading from this .csv file with JavaScript.
Challenges we ran into
We had to obtain all the latitudes and longitudes of each bus stop manually and make our own database in order to determine the closest bus stop. We also ran into issues where responsiveness would vary on different devices. Additionally, we had difficulties reaching our fourth team member and had to navigate around this issue, completing the project with 3 members.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Developing a creative and coherent way method to implement javascript functions to map specific points on a map based on user location and distance from the nearest stop. We also used web scraping to obtain all the information on bus stops with custom Python code.
What's next for BAMaps - Better Aggie Maps
In the future, we hope to continue to expand BAMaps and add useful features that allow our users to navigate Texas A&M's bus systems better than before. These features will include making BAMaps accessible on mobile phones, adding A&M-specific building names and parking spaces, allowing users to pin or favorite their most used bus routes, and displaying live bus locations.
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