Orbit Transit

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

App	What it is
Orbit Sports	Every game you can watch in Taiwan, live
Orbit Transit	Bus, train, metro and YouBike, planned and navigated
Orbit Weather	One clear forecast, to the township
Orbit Words	English vocabulary that stays
Orbit Securities	A Taiwan broker on play money
Orbit Class	Today's classes at a glance
Orbit Beats	Endless music and your own beats
Orbit Law	Laws, rulings and bills, linked
Orbit Money	Your own books
Orbit-Core	The kit, the Orbit Pass and the Workers behind them all

How it was all built, in pictures and numbers: jaypengx.com/showcase.