Cambridge Bus Timetables

In 2000 bus timetables for the Cambridge area were "officially" available on the web on the Cambridgeshire County Council web site but they were in Microsoft Word format.

At The Hug we're great believers in helping to provide community information in an open format which is accessible to everyone using the Web, even if their operating system of choice is not Windows (or even if it is: we use Windows a little, but we don't own or use Word). We also saw a need for people to be able to access timetables on the move from their PDA, which was unlikely to be able to view Word documents. Hence we created a site to let you view the timetables in plain text.

Our web site extracted the list of timetables from the County Council in real time, so it was always up to date. And when you viewed a timetable the real timetable in Word format was pulled off the County Council site onto our server and was converted to plain text at the time, using antiword. The result wasn't very pretty, but it was always up to date!

Eventually, in January 2002 the county switched to using PDF format for timetables so our site stopped working. PDF is a much more open format than MS-Word so we were happy to stop doing conversions.

According to our logs from its launch in August 2000 to the time the county switched to PDF we served 17,437 pages to people looking for timetable information in an open format.