A Toronto transit rider has launched a website that tracks subway delays and disruptions on the TTC to make commuting on the system easier for riders.

Andrew Ilersich, who has a background in programming, tells Now Toronto he developed and launched the TTCmap site after finding it increasingly difficult to find correct information on the TTC website detailing delays and alerts.

He says his final straw occurred recently when attempting to commute home, as he attempted to transfer onto the 52 bus at Lawrence Station after his subway ride, and was shocked that the bus had been redirected to Eglinton Station. 

“The service alerts didn’t say anything about the 52 bus going somewhere different. The service change page didn’t say anything either,” he said. 

He says it’s a situation that occurs far too frequently.

“There are times like that, if you’re taking the TTC all over the city, where there’s really not clear communication about how what disruptions there are,” he said.

So, last month he launched a website which shows real time delays and disruptions on the TTC subway system which is pulled directly from the TTC website. 

Ilersich says typically the TTC has several different pages where riders can find information related to disruptions and changes, for example live service alerts are in a different web page than the long-term service changes.

“To know everything that’s going on with your route, you need to check all those pages. There’s really no way around it,” he said.

However, his website makes the experience of finding the information much easier.

“My website tries to take a lot of those sources that are pertinent to a transit rider in the moment, and consolidate them in one place on a map,” he said. 

In addition, Ilersich also says his app prioritizes visual aid, compared to official TTC web pages that tend to write out disruptions.

“It plots everything on a system map so that you can just glance at it, and in a second you know exactly what’s going on,” he said.

If users want the information that comes with the full announcement, they can simply move their mouse over the icon to reveal it. 

Ilersich shared the website with the TTC board at its board meeting on Thursday, where he was met with a lot of interest and compliments.

Read More

Moving forward, Ilersich says he hopes to see the website get adopted one day, potentially even by the TTC themselves. 

“If it was official, you know, then it’d be easiest to find [and] it would be easiest to use. It would have that kind of endorsement,” he said. 

As of now, the website only shows details for the subway system, but he hopes one day it can expand to include streetcar and bus routes as well, something he says would need help from the TTC due to the difficulty.

“The announcements as they are don’t really have enough information to automate that process of drawing new lines on the map for the detours, and that would really need to be the case before I was [comfortable] rolling this out as a tool that everyone relies on,” he said.

For now, he says the website has changed the way he commutes for the better.

“It has been really useful and a lot better than the system before,” he said.