An Irish mapping website which provides details of public transport links around the country saw a 150 per cent increase in usage as a result of the recent Dublin Bus dispute, writes John Collins.

JustRoutes.com has details of almost all Dublin Bus routes in the city and 3,621 bus stops.

It also has details of all mainline rail routes and stations as well as 1,459 Bus Éireann stops.

All street names can be viewed in Irish and English, and there is also an interface for French and Polish speakers.

The site has been set up by Dave Rooney and Vinny Glennon, who were students at DCU together.

A frustrating couple of hours spent by Rooney trying to get to Rathcoole, Co Dublin, on public transport inspired them to create the site.

It is designed to allow people to find how to get from any two points in Ireland by public transport.

Dublin Bus or any of the other public transport companies do not have a similar service.

Rooney says that it took the pair just 12 weeks to prepare the site.

They quietly released it to the public in September.

Glennon, who works as a technology consultant, had previously developed Useamap.com, a site which enables users to customise and share maps.

While the mapping data underpinning JustRoutes is free from Google, Mr Rooney says that all the data regarding public transport links is their own.

"The database is our own and was done manually," says Rooney.

"We sat on buses with a GPS global positioning system] and tracked where they went and where the stops were."

Although Useamap and JustRoutes both use Google Maps, he says they could be easily changed to use data from any mapping service.

"The site uses Google Maps because that is what most people are familiar with - we could use Yahoo Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth just as easily," claims Rooney.

"As we start to include more data from around the country, we will probably look to switch as Google's data is only really good in urban areas."

Despite the two founders holding down day jobs, JustRoutes has already started to attract international attention.

Out of 10 Irish start-ups who pitched at the DemoBar event in Dublin, JustRoutes was selected to present at the prestigious Future of Web Applications event in London last month.

"For us to have a booth between Adobe and Microsoft when were barely off the ground was amazing," Rooney says.