10.07.08
Seattle buses, mobile internet, and me
It works like this: I get to the bus stop, I check the time on my cell phone, and I wait nervously. When’s the next bus scheduled? Is it on time? Will I be waiting 2 minutes or 20? Or forever? Most of the time I have no way of knowing.
Ok, sure, I could find this information on my iPhone. But it would involve visiting two separate extremely fugly websites that are even worse on a small screen: Trip Planner and MyBus. On MyBus you can save frequent queries, kind of, by bookmarking search results - but no such luck on Trip Planner. I have to type in my start and end addresses each time, even though 95% of the time they’re both in the top 5 addresses I enter.
In short, it takes several minutes of fiddling. And several minutes of flashing an iPhone around while standing at an unlit bus stop is not generally regarded a great plan.
I was about to post a plea that someone write an acceptably mobile-formatted web app that pulls data from both of these sites, or perhaps an iPhone app that does, but then I thought to check the App Store (crazy, I know).
Sure enough, I found Seattle Bus [iTunes Store link], an iPhone app that does some of the above. It looks like it pulls from MyBus, but doesn’t have trip planning functionality… yet? But it does locate the nearest bus stop based on your location, which is sweet. I’ll just hope that trip planning comes along soon. In the meantime, I’m buying this baby ($9.99) and checking it out.
Another contender is OneBusAway, a free iPhone-optimized web app with MyBus-like functionality, which I’ll also be checking out.
Let me know if there are other solutions, especially ones that integrate trip planning. Efficiency in my daily travels is kind of… a priority for me.
Liryon said,
October 8, 2008 at 1:00 pm
If you’re ever back in Boston there is http://busryda.com/, for the MBTA buses. It is of the webapp variety. I doubt they plan to expand, but it may still be interesting to see how the interface compares.
Julia said,
October 9, 2008 at 7:40 pm
Google maps has a public transit option. Granted, I’ve never used it on a mobile device, but it’s rather handy! It pulls from Seattle Metro and Sound Transit.
rachel said,
October 9, 2008 at 11:18 pm
@Liryon Thanks! I’ll check it out.
@Julia That’s true, but it’s very hard to use on mobile (the google maps mobile site does not include this feature, and neither does the google maps application that has shipped with iPhones since v1.0). I hope this is an upcoming feature of the app.
Lilith von Fraumench said,
October 26, 2008 at 4:22 pm
I found two possible options that seem to complement one another:
http://www.tapbus.com/
Tapbus lets you look up stops for certain routes, and routes for certain intersections, and from there get the arrival time for the next bus you need. It does not seem to like my Nokia XpressMusic too much, but maybe you’ll have better success.
http://www.dadnab.com/
Dadnab is text-message based by city, and in our case we’d use seattle@dabnab.com to send a message giving the start and end points as street addresses, like this: “1000 NE Northgate Way to 1500 E Pike St”. You’d get a response message with a brief but fairly accurate bus route. Feeding the above example into Dabnab’s Seattle address, I get:
1000 NE NORTHGATE WAY to 1500 E PIKE ST/depart 5th Ave NE & NE Northgate Way at 04:28 PM/MT 41-Downtown Seattle/arrive 3rd Ave & Pike St at 04:57 PM/depart Pike St & 4th Ave at 05:07 PM/MT 10-Capitol Hill/arrive 15th Ave & E Pine St at 05:17 PM
I’m trying to find a good solution to this same problem, so I’ll be keeping an eye open for updates.
Lilith von Fraumench said,
October 26, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Another, far more versatile tool:
http://www.onebusaway.org/