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Life & fun · March 21, 2023

Public transportation signage based on bloom filters (rough mockup)

Hello, I was running around Germany, hectically navigating public transportation, and getting lost all the time. I noticed that every station had i platforms, each used lists of n buses (trains, whatever) arriving, each has their list of m destinations. That means I would be scanning i x n x m items just to see if I was at the correct stop. As I was nervous, for every bus that arrived, I would rescan the list of stops to double check. I began thinking how I could make a better system. Linked is a very shoddy mockup of how bloom filters could be used to allow passengers O(1) lookup time for…

Public transportation signage based on bloom filters (rough mockup) launched on March 21, 2023 with 128 votes, #390 of 5,007 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

Visit github.com ↗Alternativestop 8% of March 2023

In plain words

This project proposes using bloom filters to improve public transportation signage at busy stations. Instead of scanning through multiple platforms, buses, and destinations to find the correct stop, passengers could perform fast lookups to verify they're at the right platform and bus. The mockup demonstrates how this data structure could reduce complexity as transportation networks grow more intricate, replacing traditional list-based systems with a more efficient approach for real-time passenger navigation.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Navigating arbitrarily complex bus systems can be tricky, especially as bus listings and routes are listed in O(N) style wall-posters. Can we use finger printing ie bloom filters to make routing decisions O(1) for the passenger? - GitHub - jsvan/BusStopBloomfilter: Navigating arbitrarily complex bus systems can be tricky, especially as bus listings and routes are listed in O(N) style wall-posters.

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hello, I was running around Germany, hectically navigating public transportation, and getting lost all the time. I noticed that every station had i platforms, each used lists of n buses (trains, whatever) arriving, each has their list of m destinations. That means I would be scanning i x n x m items just to see if I…

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