Picking on Seattle Transit
Previously posted on July 29th at: http://spaces.msn.com/members/evandodds/Blog/cns!1phaOgcvNsBxzvBN9Zpx1vbQ!131.entry
- MetroKC has a very comprehensive transit planning site to help you plan out routes, stops, times, transfers… the works. It’s a bit less handy than a pocket map, but it does a lot more!
- UW ITS provides awesome data. This is way too much for a single bullet, and it’ll spill over into a couple. What sort of data? Well, they have trackers on all the buses, and feed the current location, speed, who knows exactly what else back into a database. A database that is used to provide all sorts of great apps. Apps like…
- MyBus.org. This website is a godsend in the morning or just before leaving work. You can pop up your route and your bus stop and it’ll tell you when the next couple buses will be coming past. Not just their scheduled arrival times, but estimated REAL arrival times for when they’re running late. Of course, if we had mass RAPID transit you wouldn’t generally have to check if the bus was running la… uh, ok, let’s table that one.
- Mybus.org on your WAP Cellphone! What’s cooler than checking when the bus will be there from your desk at work? Checking it from your cellphone at the bus stop, of course! This link might not work from your desktop PC (mine wants to save to disk when I click it), but it works great from my Audiovox SMT5600 smartphone. Great phone, btw. There’re a ton of other options too — get the updates by SMS, get the updates on a palm device. Whatever. Find the one you want at www.mybus.org.
So, now you can see when the bus is coming, but what else might you care about? How about where are the buses now? How about providing a bunch of time-points for the buses instead of just for a single stop? How about plotting it on a map for you, all pretty? You guessed it… someone did!
- busmonster.com. This might just be the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s a shame it’s not tracking subway heavy-rail, but that’s hardly the busmonster site’s fault (and there I go again, hehe).
So, what if you’re a huge loser and don’t ride the bus? Well, fear not. You can still check out how absolutely unbearable your driving commute will be with the Seattle Area Traffic Conditions website and cameras. Now lots of places have cameras, so that’s just boring. But the whole “congestion map” thing was new to me when I moved here.
It shows the various highways, interstates, bridges as little blocks of green and yellow, or more often whenever I am driving, red or black. This is to indicate how fast traffic is moving, according to a variety of sensors. It’s super cool, in that you can make driving decisions (uh, should I take 405 to avoid the 520 bridge?) on the fly based on real traffic info.
It’s also super cool in that when you go to transit planning meetings/open-houses, etc they have ABSOLUTELY CONCRETE numbers showing how horribly congested our roads are here, broken out my hours of day, segment of highway, etc. It should be an easy sell to fix something with so much objective data behind it. So that makes it all the more painful to hear about things like the I-912 anti-gas-tax vote that’s coming up this fall. I’m sure I’ll post more of my thoughts on this one later on. But for now, let’s just call this a succesful “yay seattle mass transit” post and move on!
