Drawing the way through a station

At Town Hall, Central or Wynyard, the hardest part of a trip is often the few hundred metres between the street and the platform. Apple Maps is very good at streets. Inside a station, with its concourses, escalators and levels below levels, it’s easy to come out of the wrong exit or wait on the wrong platform.

So Shoo. shows the way through a station as a short list of steps, with the sign to follow at the top.

The Trip Planner already knows the floors

When Transport for NSW’s Trip Planner returns a trip, it can include the path through each station, floor by floor: where you go in, every flight of stairs, escalator and lift, and where you come out on the platform. Shoo. reads that path and draws it for every station the planner gives floors for. It started with Town Hall and Gadigal on 1 October, and by that evening it covered every station the planner draws.

Floors are numbered the way the lifts number them: 0 is the street, and Gadigal’s platforms are at -5. Repeated flights are grouped, so the row in your trip can say “2 escalators down” instead of leaving you to count.

One sentence a step

Tap that row and the station opens as a page of its own. At the top is the one sign to look for, written the way Sydney’s signs are: Follow signs for, then the mode’s letter, T for Trains or M for Metro. Under it, each step is a picture and one plain sentence, such as “Take the escalator down”, with the floor it reaches on the right, as a lift button would show it.

Tap a stairs, escalator or lift tile anywhere in the app for a short note on what it means for you. Escalators say “Stand left, walk right.” Stairs remind you that Avoid stairs is in Settings if you’re carrying luggage. Exits are named the way the green signs name them, Exit to a street or a place. When the planner has no name for one, Shoo. uses the street where your walk comes out.

What’s on each floor

For the busiest and deepest stations, from Central and Town Hall to Chatswood and Parramatta, the station page also shows what’s on each floor: toilets, lifts, ATMs, food and pharmacies. That comes from OpenStreetMap. A script gathers it once and the result ships inside the app, so your phone never asks OpenStreetMap for it.

Some walks come back from the Trip Planner without a station entrance at all. For those, Shoo. looks up the station’s entrances on OpenStreetMap once and keeps them on your phone. Only the station’s position is sent, never yours.

The part we took out

For one evening, the station page had a dot showing where you were, worked out from the barometer in your iPhone, which keeps working underground where GPS doesn’t. It went in just after 9 pm on 1 October and came out 44 minutes later. Floor heights differ from station to station, and trains moving through the tunnels push the air around, so the pressure couldn’t place you on a floor reliably. A dot on the wrong floor is worse than no dot, so the steps are just the steps.