On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Mitchell Nussbaum wrote: > I think I remember reading that Metro is planning to make real-time bus > arrival information available to riders -- by phone (punch in the ID number > for a bus stop, and listen for the time when the next bus will arrive) and, > I hope, by web. > > If Metro makes this information available, it won't be hard to put it out in > map form. Bus Monster is a Google Maps hack, put together by volunteers. A > bunch of Madison programmers with time on their hands could probably do > something very similar, whenever Metro makes the data available.
A Google search turned up some minutes[1] from a meeting of the City Transit and Parking Commission from 11/15/04. To summarize, Metro apparently has lots of cool data available to dispatchers including bus position and even the number of passengers aboard in some cases. A Metro spokesperson mentioned an upcoming service called "Web Watch", "a public interface that passengers can access via an Internet connection. A passenger can identify their route and bus stop and then see the next three buses scheduled to arrive at that particular stop." Hopefully this data will be made available at some point, because there are a lot of neat things that could be built on top of it. I'd certainly sink a good chunk of my free time into it ;) -Lyle [1] http://tinyurl.com/e2fmv (Original PDF) or http://tinyurl.com/dqbq8 (HTML) _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://www.danenet.org/mailman/listinfo/bikies
