HowToGet: almost anywhere in New South Wales, without a car

Most journey planners answer “can I get there?” with yes or no. In a state the size of New South Wales that is the wrong question: almost everywhere is reachable by some mix of transit, walking and a short car leg. The real question is how much car it costs you.

HowToGet is our answer, built as a self-initiated product on top of our public transit routing research. It searches the whole state — every train, coach, bus, ferry and on-demand service — and escalates reluctantly: walking first, on-demand shuttles where fixed routes end, a taxi only for the last miles, and where no timetable goes at all, the plan a local would actually give you.

It runs live at howtoget.postdata.ai, with a presentation landing page and an interactive map of pre-routed journeys from Sydney to places the mainstream planners give up on.

The planner searches in order of increasing car use and stops at the first rung that works, so a taxi is never proposed for a journey that walking or an on-demand service could have covered.

The routing rests on our own research: transfer-aware variants of Dijkstra that handle stop buffers and transfers of unlimited distance, and the ULTRA family of multimodal algorithms, together with the Early Pruning change we upstreamed into OpenTripPlanner. The papers are listed under References.

It was built and checked against a statewide OpenTripPlanner 2.10 graph. The public demo serves pre-routed journeys — transit legs from the Transport for NSW Trip Planner, last miles over OpenStreetMap with OSRM — so it runs as a single lightweight service without a 2.6 GB graph and a large JVM behind it.

Every destination is measured twice, departing Sydney at 08:00 the next day: once as the Transport for NSW Trip Planner answers it, once up the ladder. Across the fourteen destinations on the live map, the Trip Planner routes none of them. HowToGet routes all fourteen.

These are not ordinary towns. Every one is a place with no transit stop of its own, which is exactly where a mainstream planner stops being useful. Three of the fourteen are worse than “no route”: asked about that day, the Trip Planner quietly answers with a journey on a different day, which looks like an answer but is not one.

The comparison is one timetable against itself, not a claim about a competitor: transit legs on both sides come from the Transport for NSW Trip Planner, and the last mile is routed over OpenStreetMap. Bicycle timings are estimates at a stated pace and are marked as such in the interface.