New Feature: Simple Arrival Notification - Looking for Feedback

A common usage scenario for OneBusAway is sitting at your computer, trying to decide when you need to leave to catch the bus. Checking the OBA page for your stop gives you a good idea of when your bus will arrive. However, things get tricky if you check too far ahead of time. The predicted arrival time can change while you are waiting and, unless you are glued to the OBA stop page, you might miss the important fact that a bus that was running 5 minutes late a while ago is now back on schedule. Time to run for the bus!

To help with this situation, we've added a simple notification service to OneBusAway and we're looking for your feedback. The new feature isn't live on the main site yet, but you can try it out at:

http://alpha.onebusaway.org/

Specifically, you'll notice the OBA stop page has changed (click for a larger version):



There is now an alarm-clock icon next to each arriving bus. Click on it to get a notification alarm screen (click for a larger version):



The interface is pretty simple. Tell us how many minutes before the arrival of your bus that you want to be notified and specify either a sound or a popup alarm. So that you don't have to change these values every time you use the tool, you can save your settings for specific stops or set defaults for all stops. Just leave the window open in the background and it will periodically check on the predited arrival of your bus and notify you when the time is right.

And that's it. The notification is nothing fancy, but it's enough to grab your attention if you are easily distracted on the Internet (like me) and forget to check on the status of your bus.

As I mentioned, I'm looking for people to try out the feature and give me feedback before I push the feature to the main site. Comments on this blog entry, over email (bdferris@onebusaway.org) or through Twitter (@onebusaway) are much appreciated.

Note that we are working on fancier notifications like SMS, IM, email, Tweets, iPhone Push, etc but that it's not at the top of the work queue at the moment. If you want to vote for your favorite notification method, feel free to vote in the comments.

May 30 Service Revisions and Broken Real-Time Tracking

King County Metro schedule service revisions went into effect this morning. Read all about the changes here:

http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/sc/rideralert/ra-052009.html

OneBusAway has been updated to reflect the service revisions. Unfortunately, real-time tracking is no longer working as result. The issue is that we get our real-time feed from http://mybus.org/ and not directly from King County Metro. KCM has properly updated their tracker feed, as seen by new Saturday bus service in the tunnel:

http://trackerloc.kingcounty.gov/avl.jsp?id=332

MyBus has not been updated and is still showing no bus service in the tunnel:

http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp?id=332

Unfortunately, there are no quick and easy fixes for this problem. I can either keep the updated schedule data and have no real-time data, or rollback to the old, outdated schedule data but have some real-time info. Either way, I'm hoping MyBus is upgraded this weekend so I don't have to make any hard decisions before the Monday morning commute.

The State of OneBusAway Address: Explore

Ever wondered about a great Italian restaurant that easy to get to from your house by bus? Looking for a park to visit with your kids that's less than 20 minutes away using transit, but requires no transfers? How about looking for all the places you can live that are less than 45 minutes by bus for your daily commute?

Answering questions like these can be tricky using tools like Google's Trip Planner and almost impossible using plain old bus timetables.

We launched a new feature on OneBusAway about a month ago without much fanfare, but we think it might have a big impact on the way you use transit. It's called the OneBusAway Explore tool and it literally answers the question that is our namesake: what can I get to that's just one bus ride away?

The idea is simple. Enter a search: for example, mexican food. Enter your starting location: try your home address. Press go and watch as we determine all the places you can get by bus in 20 minutes or less and then do a local search using Yelp to find what you're looking for within your transit horizon. Try it youself:

Mexican Restaurants Near My House in Bryant

The results look something like this:



Of course, the sky is the limit. You can restrict your search by time of day, how far you wish to travel, number of transfers, and walking distance. More importantly, you can search for anything that Yelp includes in their review database, which includes everything from restaurants and doctors offices to parks and florists. When you've found something you like, we you the upcoming trip planner results so you know how to get there.

I encourage you to check out the tool and let us know what you think. In the meantime, check out this map of all the places you can get to in less than one hour from downtown Seattle at 5 pm:

Why did you ride the bus last weekend?

Normally, there is a pretty regular pattern to OneBusAway usage. Most of our traffic comes from daily commuters, with the bulk of the traffic coming during the weekday and then droping off during the weekend.



But last weekend was different:



There was no weekend drop-off. I wonder why?

The bulk of the traffic was direct visits, which usually indicates people who regularly use the site and have their favorite stops bookmarked. So it wasn't a link from a blog that brought lots of new visitors...

My best guess is that Seattle Green Fest was last weekend. Perhaps all you transit-friendly folks were taking the bus downtown to learn more about the latest in green living?

That's my theory. Why did you ride the bus last weekend?

The State of OneBusAway Address: Introductions

It's been a while since our last blog post, so I'd like to mention some exciting things that have been going on in OneBusAway land. There are actually too many exciting things to be contained in one lonley blog post, so stay tuned for a few follow ups in the near future regarding what we've been working on.

But first... what do I mean by "what we've been working on"? When I talk to people about OneBusAway, I always tend to say "we've been working on this" or "we're planning that", at which point my friends ask just who this "we" is. For the most part, that "we" has been me. However, I'm happy (and embarrassed that I haven't done it sooner) to introduce my newest partner-in-crime in this transit hacking endeavor.

I'd like to introduce Kari Watkins. Kari is a grad student in the Civil Engineering department at University of Washington. Kari does research on understanding why people do and don't take transit with the goal of getting more people to switch to a friendlier mode. That is to say, Kari actually studies mass transit, has worked in industry, and can speak knowledgeably about transit issues. I can claim no such thing myself, so it's obviously awesome to have Kari aboard. More importantly, I've personally seen Kari cruising around Seattle with her two girls in tow on both bike and bus, so I'm willing to argue that Kari is even more committed to this whole mass transit thing than I am.

Kari also gets credit for the OneBusAway name. Kari, along with Evan Siroky, had worked on a class project at UW to build a tool that let people search for nearby restaurants, parks, grocery stores, and other amenities that could be easily reached using mass transit. They called the system One Bus Away. I met Evan at a Seattle Transit Blog meetup in March of 2008, where he mentioned the project. I told Evan that I'd like to help work on the project, but I think he had already moved on to other transit hacking endeavors.

At that same meetup, Evan mentioned who I could contact at King Country Metro to get a dump of their transit database. That data dump lead to my work on real-time arrival tools and when it came time to launch a few months later, I couldn't help but notice that the http://onebusaway.org/ domain name was available. I bought, I launched, and OneBusAway as you know it today was born.

What I didn't know is that while Evan was no longer working on the original One Bus Away class project, Kari was. When she went to purchase the http://onebusaway.org/ domain name herself, she was dismayed to find that it was already taken. At this point, Evan put Kari and I in touch. I think Kari was rightfully a little skeptical of me at our first meeting, since I had effectively stolen her project name. However, we quickly realized that with my computer science skills and Kari's transit skills, we could accomplish a lot more working together than either of us could individually. Also, I promised to build Kari a real, kick-ass Web 2.0 version of her original One Bus Away concept to make up for misappropriating the OneBusAway name. How could we go wrong?

I'm proud to say that we haven't. You may have noticed a new feature of OneBusAway: the Explore tool. The Explore tool is just what Kari and Evan envisioned so long ago: the ability to search for nearby restaurants, grocery stores, parks, and other local features that area easily accessible using mass transit. For example, if I ever wondered what great mexican restaurants I can get to in less than 20 minutes by bus from my house, now I know.

As I mentioned, Kari and I have some pretty big plans in store for OneBusAway, which I look forward to telling you more about. As for now, I just wanted to welcome Kari aboard. I can say we have some big plans now, and truly mean it.

OneBusAway Database Problem

OneBusAway was down for about two hours this evening. The database server we use at UW went down and we temporarily transfered to a local database in the meantime. The UW server came back up around 9:30 pm and we're now back using the main DB.

I will have to give some thought to database fail-over.

Snow Postmortem

In case you missed it, it snowed yesterday. As you might imagine, this played havoc with Metro and was basically a replay of the December Snowpocalypse in miniature. It is, of course, ironic that OneBusAway set a new single-day traffic record on a day when the underlying tracking data was most suspect. We appreciate the links from Seattlest and even the Seattle Times (our first official mention by a Seattle newspaper) that made it happen.

In the Seattle Times piece, there is a quote from King County Council Member Dow Constantine (and candidate for King County exec?) that rang true:

"Given the increasing sophistication of modern phones and wireless Internet providers, I encourage Metro to take immediate action to use instant messaging, Twitter, neighborhood blogs, and customer self-reporting systems to keep Metro operators and riders connected."

Hmm... if only there was someone working on a set of tools that made it easier for people to find the status of their bus using a variety of phone and web devices. Say hello to OneBusAway. Specifically, we are looking to integrate real-time service alert disruption information into the system so that when you call in on the phone, it lets you know that your bus has been delayed, rerouted, or canceled completely.

In fact, OBA actually already has this feature; we added it for the last snow event. We can set routes as rerouted or canceled in the system and you will get an appropriate warning with both the web tools and the phone system. The problem is knowing which buses are rerouted.

It's pretty clear that Metro's Transit Service Status page is not an accurate reflection of what's going on in the field and it's not hard to see why. With 100s of buses live in the field at any given time and only four radio channels for communicating with dispatch, there is not enough bandwidth to get accurate reroute information and road conditions from buses to dispatch and back, let alone get accurate information from that communication up on a website.

What you get instead is confusion. I live NE of the University District and routes like the 30, 65, 68, 74, 75, and 372 provide the bulk of the coverage for my neighborhood. I watched yesterday morning as buses serving these routes each put their own personal spin on how to handle the snowy conditions. Some buses took their appropriate adverse weather reroute while others boldly soldiered on their normal route. The net result is that even when riders know the adverse weather plan for their route (that's a big if), riders had no way of knowing if the next scheduled bus would be sticking to its normal route or taking its reroute.

There are technological solutions to detecting reroutes. GPS is obviously the first choice and Metro has plans to put GPS on all buses. However, given the current budget situation for Metro, I am less than hopeful that they can make it happen in the next year or two. Given the coverage of radio beacons in our current real-time positioning network, it's actually possible to detect most reroutes using the current tech on the buses. However, it would take some hacking.

However, I'd argue that this isn't a technology problem but instead a policy problem. Being able to detect reroutes using technology is actually of little use if there is no consistency in rerouting from one trip to the next for a given route. Riders really don't need to know if the current bus is on reroute, since it's often too late to walk to a different stop if the bus is doing something different than what they expected. Instead, riders really need to know if the bus coming 30 minutes from now is on reroute, since that will help riders plan which stop they need to walk to. Unfortunately, no amount of technology will help us predict what a driver is going to do in the future.

However, technology might help us tell the driver what to do in the future. Metro currently doesn't have the radio capacity to communicate with all the drivers in the field, but many drivers carry cellphones. Much like OBA allows riders to call in to get real-time arrival information about what their bus is doing, we can imagine a similar system that allows drivers to call in and get real-time information about what their bus should be doing. With a little bit of software glue in the background, Metro could more easily manage feedback from drivers, determining which routes should be on reroute, and then pushing that information to drivers in an automated way. It would reduce the amount of human intervention required in the system and be pretty cheap to build. Pretty cool, huh?

It's pretty clear that there are a lot of interesting technical solutions that can make it easier for drivers, transit agencies, and riders to effectively communicate what is going on in chaotic situations like a snowy morning commute. While we can never fix the fact that it's just plain hard to drive in the snow, there are a lot of things we can and should be doing to make everything else easier.