Wanting to build a trip planner like Embark

A year ago, Ink & Switch dropped a blog post about Embark, a prototype for a trip planner, in which places and times could be embedded in text and the planner could easily compare different transit mode options. There were a lot of interesting ideas in there – some of which are more relevant to Ink & Switch's long-running research areas than to my personal interests.

I got the chance to play with Embark, and it was inspirational. I've been wanting to build something like it ever since. I did come away with the conclusion that I wanted a plain-text Markdown representation, not the structured representation in Embark. The structured text editor was too magical and felt kind of hard to pick up. The multi-view system also was a little unintuitive, for me.

I've written two abortive prototypes so far. I haven't gotten far, mostly because of a few basic stumbling blocks. Here are some of them:

Pasting Google Links

As much as I love OpenStreetMap, Mapbox, and so on, I do most of my POI searching in Google, and I use Google’s system for saving places I want to go to. Ideally, this tool would work well with copy & pasting a URL from Google Maps and putting it on the map. This is a good example of something that seems so easy, and is nearly impossible. Google Maps URLs are extremely opaque. Scraping Google Maps HTML for those pages is virtually impossible. There are no identifiers anywhere in the whole thing. Google has Place IDs for their Geocoding API, but these aren't exposed to normal users anywhere.

So, most likely I'll have to just integrate the Google Geocoder into the project and store the place_ids, and maybe create some single-use domain that is like https://geospatiallinkredirector.com/google/place_id that points to Google Maps.

Directions

I think that using the Transit API is the clear answer here. Mostly I care about city trips anyway, and it handles that super well.

Editing

I think maybe this should live as an Obsidian plugin, so that I don't have to build storage, or editing fundamentals. There's some precedent of enhanced links in Obsidian, the github-link plugin that I already use.

But there are some sharp edges for very advanced Obsidian plugins: most of the cool plugins use fenced code blocks for their custom content. Interacting with the rest of the Markdown document is a bunch harder because Obsidian has its own 'hypermarkdown' document parser, with an undocumented structure. I'd possibly have to re-parse the document using a different Markdown parser for this project, which makes me a little nervous.

POIs

The assumption that most POIs will be from Google will probably make this project more straightforward, but I've been getting nerdsniped by the other alternatives. Like, is the Overture GERS ID system useful here, and should I use its nicely-licensed open source dataset? What about SafeGraph IDs? I don't know. I should probably just use Google Maps and call it a day.

Realistically, the biggest problem with getting this side project done is my lack of time allocated to side projects recently. I'm spending my 9-5 focused on Val Town, and my weekends and afternoons are dedicated more to reading, running, social activities, and generally touching grass, rather than hacking on web projects. I miss the web projects, but not that much.