PurpleTime

GitHub

PurpleTime provides riders of Knox Area Transit’s Purple Line with the shuttle’s live location.

I built it as my senior capstone in Scientific Computing at Kenyon. I worked with KAT to understand their needs, talked to students who rely on the Purple Line, and gave three presentations throughout development to gather feedback.

Public transit in Knox County is limited. Knowing where the shuttle is makes a real difference for riders, who previously had no way to track it—sometimes waiting far longer than necessary in dry Ohio winters.

The irony: the shuttles were already sending realtime location data to KAT via onboard Android tablets. It just wasn’t available to anyone else.

The data was there. It was just locked away. All KAT needed was an app to surface it. So I made one.

On the backend, an Express server fetches shuttle locations from KAT’s scheduling software in KML format, parses them, and pushes coordinates to the client via Socket.io. On the frontend, they’re plotted on a Leaflet map and refreshed whenever the data changes.

COVID cut the project short. I’d planned to launch and promote the app across Mount Vernon and Gambier, and eventually expand it to cover every KAT line. The groundwork is there—it just never went live.

If you’re a current Kenyon student or community member interested in taking this over, get in touch.