The bus and tram tracker is realtime vehicle tracker. Upon navigating to the site the user will be shown a map, centered on their current position. The user can see all of the tracked vehicles, and can see the routes the vehicle will take. Drivers take an Android tablet with them when they start their shift. The tablets are locked into displaying the tram driver web page, and when they choose the vehicle they are driving, they appear on the map to all users. The entire application lives in the browser and doesn't require any installation by the user.

This project was my first unconventional project. Up until then my time at CHQ was mostly taken up by small scripts, infrastructure projects, or websites that didn't stray much from typical MVC design patterns. This was my second realtime project ever, after having made a small web game inspired by Jackbox's phone controls in college. It's fascinating to think about how this was only three years ago (at time of writing), but the state of realtime web applications in Django was rough. It definitely wasn't the right tool for the job, but with most CHQ projects, the timetable required me to move fast. I don't think I could have delivered using a more websocket friendly framework. Either way, the satisfaction of getting this site to work for the first time was immensely rewarding.

With most projects I do, I feel like there's more that we could do with this web application. I would love to redo good portions of it, as the codebase has some technical debt issues due to the initial timeline of one month. The hardest part of the application has always been the driver tablets. The driver side of the application is prone to user error, and Chautauqua never had the staff dedicated to babysitting the application when errors would happen. Given significantly more time, or a phase two for this project would be to move the driver application to an embedded platform that uses an low power microcontroller that communicates over LoRa or Cellular that could just be permanently installed into the golf carts.