Dubious ordering of stations in the "by line" view

[andreimatei]

I'm confused by the order in which stations are listed when looking at one line. There seem to be stretches for which they're listed in order, but the order is not complete from one end to another.
What am I missing / could they be completely ordered? Alternatively, perhaps one could opt into an ordering going away from their current GPS location.

For example, the D starts like:
http://traintrack.nyc/app/line/D

Atlantic Av - Barclays Ctr
36 St
Coney Island - Stillwell Av
9 Av
Fort Hamilton Pkwy

Awesome website, btw!

[mrjones]

Hey Andrei, thanks for posting this. The short answer is that it should be possible to do better on the station ordering. I haven't gotten around to getting it working, but now that I know someone is out there, maybe I will :)

The MTA provides some metadata files about stations, routes, etc. For the station lists, TrainTrack currently does the easiest thing I could think of by reading the list of stations (https://github.com/mrjones/traintrack/blob/master/data/Stations.csv) and using the ordering from that file. As you observed, it seems to work for sections, but it's not correct overall.

There is another metadata file which does have ordering of stations (https://github.com/mrjones/traintrack/blob/master/data/stop_times.txt). So, it should be possible to merge the station names from Stations.csv with the ordering provided in stop_times.txt.

A little while back, some of this got implemented in Stops::new_from_csvs ( https://github.com/mrjones/traintrack/blob/master/src/stops.rs), but there are a few things left to work out so it's still disabled until I fix those things up. I'll let you know when I do!