Taiwan's buses, 台鐵, 高鐵, metros and YouBike in one app, with trips planned the way people really travel. Part of Orbit, a family of phone apps for life in Taiwan that share one sign-in, the Orbit Pass. See them all at orbit.jaypengx.com.
Features
- Map: every bus stop with live arrival times, YouBike stations with bikes and docks (the five nearest along the bottom), train and metro stations, search and your pins.
- Trip planning across bus, 台鐵, 高鐵, the metros and YouBike, ranked by door-to-door minutes and how much bother each way is. There is always a recommendation.
- Navigation that follows the trip: every step moves on by itself, countdowns, the stops to go, a buzz before yours, the next bus if you miss one, and it survives the app being swiped away.
- Timetables: 台鐵 and 高鐵 station to station, bus routes and stops, and each city's metro drawn as a metro map with the trains arriving now.
- YouBike rental timer that warns before TPASS's free half hour runs out and offers docks nearby.
- 到站提醒: "tell me when the 5608 is 5 minutes away", checked by the server while the phone is locked.
- Service notices from the operators themselves: a stopped line or route is marked and never planned.
- Saved places and trips (家, 學校, your own), synced through the Orbit Pass.
Tech stack
| Layer | What |
|---|
| App | Plain JavaScript (ES modules), HTML and CSS; no framework, no build step, no dependencies |
| Platform | Installable web app with a service worker; location and vibration for navigation, lock-screen notices while it runs |
| Shared | Look, Orbit Pass, notices and data reads from the kit in Orbit-Core |
| Data | TDX (Taiwan's transport data exchange) through the Orbit proxy on Cloudflare Workers; weekly bus packs and line shapes in Cloudflare R2 |
| Maps | Google Maps under the month's cap, else Leaflet with NLSC's tiles; walks on Google's streets, else OpenStreetMap |
| Routing | Our own 台鐵/高鐵 router (Connection Scan) and metro router, beside Google's and TDX's planners |
| Tests | node --test, including navigation driven fix by fix and the owner's verdicts on real trips |
How it works
plan a trip
├─ Google's planner ┐
├─ TDX's planner ├─► every way, re-timed by live bus estimates
├─ rail.mjs (CSA) │
└─ metro router ┘
▼
plan.mjs rank: 1. fold the ways a person wouldn't take
2. order the rest by minutes + a small table of bother
▼
nav.mjs: the whole trip on the map, step by step, live
- Costs in minutes, the way a person feels them: a short wait at home counts a third, changing onto a train is easy and onto a bus a risk, YouBike past 30 minutes counts 4.5× per minute, walking is 5 km/h.
- Planned once: a saved trip's ways are kept and only re-timed; the billed planners are asked again only when the ways could differ.
- What's near you is worked out on the phone from R2 packs, not asked of a server.
The full map, the ranking rules and the decisions in force: MAP.md.
Project structure
public/
├── index.html, app.mjs the frame: Pass, tabs, location
├── transit.css the app's look on top of the kit's
├── lib/ 42 modules
│ ├── planner.mjs, plan.mjs, live.mjs planning, ranking, live re-timing
│ ├── rail.mjs, metro*.mjs train router; metro router, boards, maps
│ ├── bus.mjs, near.mjs, packs.mjs, shapes.mjs
│ ├── bike.mjs, rental.mjs, rivers.mjs, tpass.mjs
│ ├── nav.mjs, navlive.mjs, buzz.mjs, alerts.mjs
│ ├── service.mjs operators' notices as rules
│ └── tab-*.mjs, map.mjs, store.mjs each tab; the map; the Pass's data
└── sw.js
scripts/ live trips, verdicts, replays, metro maps
tests/ node --test, with tests/verdicts/
MAP.md how it works, file by file
Getting started
The app loads the shared kit from a sibling folder, so clone this repo next to Orbit-Core:
git clone https://github.com/JayPengX/Orbit-Core.git
git clone https://github.com/JayPengX/Orbit-Transit.git
cd Orbit-Transit
Requirements: Node.js 22 or newer. There is nothing to install: no framework, no node_modules.
npm test # links ../Orbit-Core/kit as .kit, then runs node --test
See it on a phone-sized screen, signed in with a made-up wallet and real data (needs Playwright):
# a screenshot, saved in /tmp/orbit-preview
node ../Orbit-Core/tools/preview.mjs transit --live --width 375
# serve it, then open http://localhost:8123/Orbit-Transit/
node ../Orbit-Core/tools/preview.mjs transit --live --serve --port 8123
--dark, --lang en, --webkit (Safari's engine) and the other flags are listed in Orbit-Core/tools/README.md.
Run a trip on today's real data, and compare the ranking before and after a change:
node scripts/live.mjs 竹東站 縣體育場
node scripts/live.mjs --against HEAD
scripts/replay.mjs re-runs a debug log (--why shows each way's score) and scripts/verdict.mjs saves a new verdict.
Deploying
Push to main. GitHub Actions runs the tests, stamps every file with its content hash (so a phone downloads only what changed) and publishes public/ to GitHub Pages; the site Worker serves it at its orbit.jaypengx.com address. There are no pull requests or release branches.
Part of Orbit
How it was all built, in pictures and numbers: jaypengx.com/showcase.
