Live Transit Detroit · Installment 03 · October 2026
Belle Isle, Rendered
Published October 7, 2026 · By Justin Spencer Smith
DDOT route 12 (Conant) serves Belle Isle. The GTFS data carries 24 stops in the island's bounding box, and 20 of the route's 79 path points sit on the island itself — including the Inselruhe interior stops. But the Live Transit map rendered no island at all: the ground is a single dark plane, the Detroit River is not drawn as water, and Belle Isle was not drawn as land. Route 12's ribbon drove across undifferentiated ground — service to a place that did not exist on the map.
The gap, precisely
The map's geography layers were: a uniform ground plane (0x0d1319), tiered OSM street geometry, route ribbons, stops, and landmark massing. Water was never rendered, so the island had no visual context — and no island polygon existed in any data file. The route and stop data were correct; the landmass was absent. This is the honest-render rule working as intended: the data said service exists, the map did not show the place, so the map was wrong.
What shipped
| Change | What it does |
|---|---|
| Island outline | True-form OSM boundary (Nominatim leisure=nature_reserve), 488 points, pre-projected to the page's coordinate system in assets/belle-isle.json. |
| Verification | Polygon triangulates to 486 faces; area ~3.66 km². Both island-interior GTFS stops ("Inselruhe & Loiter Way", "Inselruhe & Riverbank") fall inside; all mainland Jefferson stops fall outside. 20 of 79 route-12 path points land on the island. |
| Rendering | Filled landmass at y=3 — above the ground plane, below the street tiers — in dark park-green, with a shoreline stroke and a floating "Belle Isle" place label on a tether, the same label treatment as the People Mover layer. |
| Optional layer | Fetched independently of the route data. If the file is absent, the map renders without the island. No failure path, no blocking. |
Verification
Served bytes confirmed before this article published: the page references JS stamp v20261007-0715, the served JS contains the island builder, and assets/belle-isle.json serves 200 with 489 polygon points. A full two-level UAT round (smoke + interactive: island shape, label, route-12 ribbon, follow-camera behavior) ran against the production build.
Shipped with
The Belle Isle layer rode the v20261007-0715 promotion with three follow-camera fixes from the same morning's reports: cursor-anchored zoom now disables while tracking (it was re-anchoring the orbit target off the bus), the selected bus no longer shows a redundant route badge, and the Follow OFF toggle survives re-tapping the same bus.
Open items
- The Detroit River itself is still not rendered as water — the island currently sits on the dark ground plane. A river polygon is the natural next geography layer.
- Mobile verification of the follow-camera fixes has no automated path; on-device testing is the only coverage.
- SMART live feed remains blocked on the Swiftly API key.