OneBusAway

The Future of OneBusAway

2011-06-14T08:41:00.000-07:00

Dear riders,

Hi. We've not been properly introduced. My name is Brian and I'm the creator of OneBusAway. I'm a bus rider just like you and I started OneBusAway almost three years ago with the simple goal of making it easier to ride the bus. I'm also a grad student at UW getting my PhD in computer science. I managed to convince my advisors a while back to let me work on OneBusAway as part of my graduate research and things have been going well ever since.

Perhaps too well: there are now over fifty thousand of you using OneBusAway every week. That's an amazing number of riders for a grad student project. Of course, the trouble with grad students is that we sometimes actually graduate. Assuming my defense goes well a week from Thursday, that'll be my trouble too. The big question then is, "What's next?"

For me, I want to keep helping transit riders. Working on this project has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done and I have no intention of stopping now if I can help it. What's more, I want to help riders world-wide, not just in Seattle. That and a lot of other reasons led me to my ultimate decision.

I'm going to work for Google. Specifically, the Google Transit team. If you've ever used Google Maps to plan a trip using public transit from point A to point B, then you're familiar with their work. Why Google? To put it simply, Google has done more to improve than usability of public transit than any other company I can think of. Their transit trip planner has made trip planning possible for hundreds of agencies where it wasn't before, and dramatically improved the trip planning experience for many agencies with planners of their own. What's more, projects like OneBusAway would not even be possible without the work of Google engineers. Their efforts to establish the GTFS spec for exchanging transit schedule data really launched the open transit data revolution that has lead to apps like OneBusAway and countless others. And perhaps you've heard they're getting into real-time?

What does that mean for you? My goal is that some day soon, you'll be getting all your transit info from Google. I'm sure some of you are skeptical of this goal, but I hope to change your mind. While I don't claim to speak for my future employer, Google already has some of the best tools anywhere for helping pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, and yes even car drivers, and they are only going to get better. I plan on doing everything > I < can to help that process along. And before I leave for Google this summer, I'm doing everything I can to make sure Puget Sound transit agencies are putting their best foot forward in terms of providing the data that powers services like OneBusAway and Google Transit. I won't say too much about that now, but in case you doubt my conviction, know that I'll be defending my dissertation and going through new employee orientation at King County Metro less than 24 hours apart. Dreams really do come true people ; )

In the meantime, we're not pulling the plug on OneBusAway the day I graduate. OneBusAway is NOT "abandoning Seattle". I'm doing everything in my power to make sure the lights stay on and while I can't say exactly what that will look like at this time, know that there are a number of options on the table and I'm confident we'll find a solution going forward.

As I've said before, working on OneBusAway has been an incredibly rewarding experience and it wouldn't be possible without the thousands of OneBusAway users like you. If you're anything like me, I know OneBusAway is a critical part of your daily commute (I don't even know how to get get home when OneBusAway is down). I'm doing everything I can in the future to keep building tools that help make using public transit a little easier for riders like you. While I can't promise exactly what that future will look like, all that I can ask is that you judge me by the work I've done as I pursue the work I hope to do.

Thanks,
Brian

OBA Blue - Real-Time Trip Planning iPhone App BETA

2011-06-01T16:01:00.000-07:00

Update: the Beta sign-up is closed!

One of the top-requested features for OneBusAway since pretty much day one has been to combine the trip planning capabilities of King County Metro's or Google's trip planner with the real-time transit data provided by OneBusAway.

I'm happy to reveal that we're a little bit closer to realizing that goal. I've been working in secret (poorly kept if you know where to look) on real-time trip planning capabilities for OneBusAway and a corresponding iPhone app. It's been slow going... did I mention I defend my PhD in three weeks? However, things are starting to come together and I'm ready to start gathering feedback from OneBusAway users.

That's right, we're having a beta and you're invited. Details follow, but first, a brief glimpse of what you're in for:

Update: the Beta sign-up is closed!

Bad Memorial Day Schedule Data

2011-05-30T08:15:00.000-07:00

Update: I've put a temporary hack in place that fixes most of the schedule data, but not all real-time seems to be work. I'd still advice you take a look at the KCM holiday schedule page below.

The schedule data I get from King County Metro does not properly take into account Memorial Day Holiday scheduling, which unfortunately means incorrect schedules and no real-time data today. Super frustrating, I know!

The best I can advise is to have you take a look at King County Metro's holiday scheduling page: goo.gl/5M2Dj

Holiday scheduling has been broken in the data I get from King County Metro for a while now. If you are as frustrated by this as I am, please let King County know: goo.gl/DLSa8

Issues with OneBusAway iPhone App 1.1.3 Update

2011-03-22T09:43:00.001-07:00

A number of users have been reporting issues with the most recent 1.1.3 update to the OneBusAway iPhone app. Specifically, the app has been crashing on startup for some users, which is obviously not a good thing!

I didn't immediately pull the 1.1.3 update from the app store, because I could tell from my server logs that the number of users who had successfully upgraded far outnumbered the users who had reported problems. That said, I apologize it's taken me this long to figure out what's going on with the crash. The issue turned out to be with a 3rd party user-feedback widget from IdeaScale that we include in app, which caused problems on the upgrade for anyone who had used the widget in the past.

For those of you affected by the crash I can offer a couple of solutions:

1) Uninstall and reinstall the app. This will fix the crash immediately, but at the cost of losing your bookmarks and other app settings.

2) Wait for the next update from app store. I'm doing what I can to get the app through the review process as quickly as possible, but this could still take up to a week. UPDATE: The updated app is now in the app store! (Version = 1.1.4)

3) If you have a ton of bookmarks that you don't want to lose with #1 and you can't wait for #2, you can send me your device id at contact@onebusaway.org and I can send you an ad-hoc build of the app today. I've only got so many ad-hoc slots left, so I can't promise I can fit everyone using this method.

Again, my apologies for any trouble this update is causing users.

King County Metro Spring Break Schedule Errors

2011-03-21T16:28:00.000-07:00

Due to errors in the schedule data published by King County Metro, we are currently showing a number of trips in OneBusAway that should actually be canceled for UW spring break. Keep an eye out for this if you are making trips around campus this week. More details here:

http://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/holiday-service.html

King County Metro currently does not publish accurate holiday scheduling data in their feeds, which affects service like OneBusAway, Google, and Bing Maps. If accurate schedules are important to you, let King County Metro know:

http://metro.kingcounty.gov/cs/feedback_choose.html

PS - "Who would be on campus during spring break anyway?" you might ask. Answer: hard working grad students like me ; )

Community Transit Schedule Updates

2011-03-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

A number of Community Transit service changes went into effect last Sunday, March, 20th, with many updates concerning Mountlake Terrace. Details about the changes can be found at the Community Transit news page.

Unfortunately, the latest schedule and route data from Community Transit wasn't quite ready for the service change and the CT schedules in OneBusAway are likely to have inaccuracies in the meantime. I've been given access to half of the data I need, but I'm waiting on a GIS data dump hopefully later this week to complete the update. In the meantime, you unfortunately need to check CT schedule data in OneBusAway against official data sources at http://www.commtrans.org/ to ensure 100% accuracy.

OneBusAway iPhone App Updated

2010-12-21T19:33:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to announce that we've released an update to the OneBusAway iPhone application.

What's new?

Support for service alerts - details about detours, cancellations, and other service changes.
Better route and trip maps.

You can grab the app here. Hopefully the update will go smoothly for you, but let us know if you have any issues.

The primary change is one that you hopefully won't see any time soon. As we hinted in our discussion of the most recent snow storm here in the Puget Sound region, we've had some changes in the works to make it easier to show you information about reroutes, cancellations, and other service changes. You can see a demo video of service alerts in action below:

Another minor change we made is a tweak to the map display of routes and trips. We now show the full route path, not just stops, for routes and trips (only on iOS 4.x devices):

Thanks to all our beta-testers for their feedback on the app. We appreciate your feedback too, so let us know what you think of the new app.

OneBusAway iPhone App UI Design Question

2010-12-04T15:42:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for some feedback on a user-interface design issue in the OneBusAway iPhone app. I figure there are some iPhone designers and users out there that might have some good ideas on how to tackle the problem. The problem is this:

When you are looking at real-time info for a stop, there are a variety of actions you might want to take: add a bookmark, filter the routes, see nearby stops, show the full schedule, see service alerts, report a problem... the list gets longer every day. And so does the list of buttons at the bottom of the arrivals screen:

I think that list of action buttons is getting a little overwhelming. One option is to put them all on a separate screen with a single action button leading things off:

The problem with this approach is that it reduces the visibility of those options. In fact, the very first revision of the app worked this way and I had a lot of reports from users that they couldn't figure out how to bookmark their stop, mostly because the action wasn't very visible.

Update:

Another option is some sort of detail indicator on the stop name itself:

Also a number of people have commented on the Service Alert indicator. The image above shows what happens when you have an unread stop-oriented service alert (very visible). Once you've read the service alert, the main service alert element shown above goes away. However, we still include it the action list at the bottom so that you can go back an access the service alert after you've read it.

Our options are limited in some ways, because some normal places you might put action buttons (the upper right corner, the lower toolbar) are already spoken for.

Does anyone have any thoughts on how to deal with this trade-off between an increasing number of actions and the desire to make them visible to the user? Especially in an iPhone app? Maybe you've seen another app that does this well. I'd love your feedback.

Feel free to leave a comment or drop an e-mail at contact@onebusaway.org. Thanks!

The Snow Came Too Soon

2010-11-22T08:35:00.000-08:00

I know of a lot of you are probably frustrated that OneBusAway is pretty much useless (no real-time, no snow reroute info) on a day when you need it most. I'm pretty frustrated too, if only because I have been working with King County Metro and other agencies over the past couple of months to try to get adverse weather reroute information into OneBusAway.

The good news is that we are making a lot of progress, but the bad and somewhat obvious news is that I didn't finish in time.

Of course, you could argue that I've had two years to prep for this, but we've only recently had time and resources to work on service alert information in OneBusAway. And the lack of gps-based tracking for King County Metro buses is always going to be a problem.

All I can say is that I'm working hard to be ready for the next storm. And to prove that this is not just a vapor-ware promise, here is what you have to look forward too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DJLgHTxC8I

(Fast forward to 0:35 seconds in for the good stuff. And don't worry, everyone without an iPhone we're still thinking about you too).

King County Metro, Snow, and Real-Time Tracking

2010-11-22T08:10:00.000-08:00

You'll notice that there is currently no real-time data available or King County Metro buses in OneBusAway. The issue is that King County Metro pulled the real-time feed because of the snow and adverse weather reroutes today. Why would they pull the real-time feed in conditions where you'd probably agree that it would be extra useful? They do so because the current tracking system for King County Metro buses doesn't work well when buses are on adverse weather reroute.

When a bus is on adverse weather reroute (see http://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/rr/adverseweather.html for a current list), real-time arrival predictions are not accurate for that route. Why is that?

The position of each bus in Metro KC is not tracked with GPS, but rather with a decidedly lower-tech approach. Each bus is outfitted with a device that can radio the current odometer reading for the bus back to a server. If we know the odometer reading when the bus starts its route, we can periodically monitor the real-time odometer readings to determine how far along the route the bus has traveled. This gives us an estimate of position and from there, an estimate of how early or late a bus is. This is how http://mybus.org works and OneBusAway is just a fancy front-end to MyBus.

The problem comes with buses on adverse weather reroute, or any type of temporary reroute. When a bus goes on reroute, the physical route changes and the odometry calculation based on the original route used above is no longer accurate. In a perfect world, we would know when a bus is on reroute and adjust to its new route. Unfortunately, there is currently no automated way for handling this situation.

The result, unfortunately, is that on days when it is often cold and miserable and you'd rather not wait outside any longer than you have to for your bus, the real-time tracker often doesn't work. Ironic, huh?

I'd argue that King County Metro went too far in cutting the ENTIRE feed, as there are plenty of buses that aren't on reroute where the real-time tracking would be extra useful to riders today. If you feel the same way, definitely let them know.

OneBusAway for Windows Phone 7

2010-11-09T00:33:00.001-08:00

With the U.S. launch of Windows Phone 7, we are proud to announce a native OneBusAway client for new WP7 users.

Though I say "we", I really can't take much credit at all. Instead, I want to recognize a number of developers who have been hacking away on the client for the past few months to get it ready for the Windows Phone 7 launch. OneBusAway wouldn't happen without the help and support of developers like this, and I appreciate all their efforts.

The app is open-source, so check out the project page if you'd like to help make the app even better. And just a reminder that all the OneBusAway data that powers apps like this is available for developers to use to create new an interesting apps. Check out the API for more details.

Problems for T-Mobile SMS Users

2010-10-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

If you are a T-Mobile customer and a user of the OneBusAway SMS interface, you've probably noticed that the service has stopped working in the last few days. The issue is that we use a free, ad-supported SMS service called Textmarks. T-Mobile recently raised the rates they charge services like Textmarks for sending and receiving SMS messages such that Textmarks can no longer afford to send free, ad-supported messages to T-Mobile customers.

I'm still trying to figure out what to do about this. OneBusAway has been lucky that we don't have any recurring monthly costs thanks to a generous donation of servers + hosting from UW CSE. Hopefully we can find some way to maintain SMS service that fits within the limits of our non-existent budget ; ) If anyone has any creative ideas or thoughts on potential solutions (SMS-email gateway, SMS via Twitter, etc) feel free to leave a comment.

Help Report Data Issues Directly from Your IPhone

2010-10-07T07:46:00.000-07:00

Every schedule update from our local transit agencies brings changes and, invariably, errors. I don't fault the agencies for that, since managing a fleet of hundreds of buses across thousands of stops is a complex task.

However, we as riders have a unique opportunity to help find and fix the errors we encounter on a day-to-day basis with the systems we use. Who else better to find the bugs with bus schedules than riders? While OneBusAway has always had multiple ways that you can use to contact us when you have problems, we want to make it even easier.

In the recent 1.1.0 update to the OneBusAway iPhone app, we've added in-app problem reporting. You can submit issues about stops, buses, routes, and real-time arrival errors. When you submit from within the app, it adds valuable context information about time, location, stops, and trips that help me debug these problems on the back end.

How do you report a problem? Look for the "Report a Problem" button when looking at arrival information for a stop:

From there, you can report issues about a stop or a specific bus. When it comes to issues with the real-time arrival information, it would be great if you could submit a problem every time you have an issue (up to a week's worth of reports), as it will help me separate one-time problems from recurring problems that need the full attention of the agency.

I hope that these tools will make it easier for you to identify problems and faster for us to fix them. We hope to expand this functionality to our other mobile apps as well.

Not seeing your bus downtown? Interlined route issues are now fixed

2010-10-07T06:53:00.000-07:00

Interlined-routes, a bus that enters downtown as one route and leaves as another, are a recurring issue with the data from King County Metro. The symptoms occur when you are looking at your stop on OneBusAway, not seeing the route you care about but instead seeing a bunch of routes that don't seem to actually serve the stop. The latest schedule update was no exception, and I'd say 90% of your bug reports have been about that issue.

I'm happy to say that I've hopefully fixed the latest batch of schedule data. It took a bit longer than usual, but hopefully it will make OneBusAway work better for a lot of you.

Why so much downtime lately?

2010-10-05T08:57:00.000-07:00

If you've been using OneBusAway much in the last two or three weeks, you've probably noticed a lot more connection errors, Fail Bus sightings, and general downtime. I don't want to waste your time with a ton of excuses... but here they are ; ) The general problem is a combination of:

1) An on-going server upgrade and flakiness in the backup server.
2) More users than we've ever had before, especially a new bump when UW came back in session.

I know #2 is a problem any website would like to have and our traffic is a drop in the bucket compared to what some of you engineers out there deal with on a daily basis. That said, we're getting past the point where a single machine can reasonably handle the load. The new server that should help with the traffic is ready and waiting to be put into action, but I'm unfortunately in NYC for the week, so there may be some more bumps this week.

For the more technically-oriented among you who have been curious after I posted a plea for help, here's my theory about what's going on:

1) Terracotta, which I'm using to share session / state information between multiple Tomcat instances, is crashing after a segfault in the JVM. I'm not sure what's causing the segfault, but the last time I had JVM segfaults, it was due to bad memory in the machine. It's something I will check when I'm back in Seattle.
2) The Terracotta crash causes my Tomcat instances to hang as well. In some cases, the Tomcat instance seemed to spin up a bunch of threads in response to the Terracotta crash, which at up the non-heap memory available to my JVM instances and lead to the thread creation error messages I posted earlier.

Fall Service Revisions: Specific Issues

2010-10-02T08:03:00.000-07:00

A number of agencies have updated their schedules this morning:

I've tried to update OneBusAway to reflect the latest changes, but there are a number of issues you should know about:

King County Metro

1) Currently, trip destination labels are missing from King County Metro routes. There was a typo in the data from KCM that caused the problem, but I'm rerunning the data and should have it up in a few hours.

2) ~~Until the MyBus system is updated, real-time data isn't available for all routes yet.~~ Looks like it's been updated.

3) Real-time data doesn't yet appear to be available for the Rapid Ride A Line to developers yet. Will keep you posted when it becomes available.

Pierce Transit

1) It appears that Pierce Transit's updated schedule data actually goes live on Sunday morning instead of Saturday morning, so there's currently nothing showing up for Pierce Transit routes. Hoping to fix that soon.

OneBusAway iPhone App Updated

2010-09-09T01:23:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that we've released an update to the OneBusAway iPhone application.

What's new?

Support for iOS 4 features, including multi-tasking, backgrounding, and high-res icons.
Easier map navigation, including automatic refresh when dragging the map
Fewer annoying pop-ups, like "No stops found." messages.
Extended trip details, including map and list views of the route taken by a particular trip and upcoming stops.

You can grab the app here. Hopefully the update will go smoothly for you, but let us know if you have any issues.

The primary change that might affect how you use the app is the map navigation component. You can still quickly find stops nearby your current location, but you can also drag the map around and stops will automatically refresh in the current map view. The upshot is that you will no longer get annoying "No stops found" pop-ups if there are no stops in your current map view.

One neat new feature is that you can now get more details about a particular trip by selecting it from the arrivals and departures list for a particular stop. You can use the trip details page to see information about the route traveled by a particular trip, including upcoming stops in both map and list form. This feature has often been requested and is super-useful if you want to see where a particular bus is going and when it's going to get there. Additionally, it lays the ground work for a new feature we're working on: stop approach notifications, the current #1 feature request from users. Hopefully more on that sooner rather than later.

Thanks to John Jensen for all his work in making this release happen, and all the beta-testers for their feedback on the app.

We appreciate your feedback, so let us know what you think of the new app.

Community Transit Schedule Data Added to OneBusAway

2010-08-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

We're often asked about adding Community Transit to OneBusAway, and the answer has always been the same: CT doesn't have the time or resources to release their data. However, lack of time and resources is the normal state of affairs here at OneBusAway, so we're excited to tell you that we've made some big progress in adding Community Transit to OneBusAway.

We're proud to announce that Community Transit schedule data is now live in OneBusAway.

Behold: Swift, the 101 , and all your favorites.

Now the catch: this is just schedule data and not real-time arrival data. As stated before, CT does not have real-time tracking equipment on their buses and that isn't likely to change in the short-term. In the meantime, we'll see what we can do about getting real-time data for Swift (which does have tracking equipment) into OneBusAway, but the best way to make that happen is to let CT know that this is important to you at riders@commtrans.org.

Either way, we hope that the schedule data will still prove useful.

Special thanks to Joe Julian, whose FOIA request of CT schedule data made this possible, and to Tim for his help hacking and debugging the GTFS.

User Accounts and Better Bookmarks

2010-07-20T02:12:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I talked about some new features that would hopefully make life easier for users of the OneBusAway phone and SMS interfaces. Those new features actually launched last month, so I wanted to highlight them again in case you missed it.

So what's new?

User accounts: you can now login to OneBusAway
Bookmarks: manage your phone and SMS bookmarks from the web

Let's break it down. You've probably noticed the "Settings" link up on the nav bar, where you can currently set your privacy and search settings. We've added Registration and Login buttons where you can login to your account and transfer your settings between computers.

Once you've logged in, you'll notice some additional links on your settings page, including the ability to register a phone number with your account and manage your bookmarks. The best part is that once you've registered your phone number, managing your bookmarks online will also update your bookmarks on your phone and SMS.

The bookmarks feature is neat because it let's you setup bookmarks with:

multiple stops
custom bookmark names
route filters

This can be especially useful for the phone and SMS interfaces, where space and bandwidth are tight and you really want to limit the information you see from OneBusAway.

Does all this sound cool? Give a shot and let me know how it works. Thanks!

We want your feedback!

2010-07-19T17:11:00.000-07:00

We're always looking for ways to improve OneBusAway. To make giving your feedback easier, we've launched an IdeaScale feedback site:

http://onebusaway.ideascale.com/

You can go there to submit new ideas and features and vote for the ones that are most important to you. We will use ideas submitted at the feedback site to help guide future development for OneBusAway.

It's also important to understand that we take more than just votes into account when picking our next task. We'll balance the popularity of a suggestion along with the time it will take to implement and the value impact of the feature. We practice Value Sensitive Design, which means we try to consider the human value impact of any new feature we add to OneBusAway. We consider values a variety of values when evaluating a new feature:

rider efficiency
community
trust
privacy
dignity
safety
efficacy/accessibility/self-reliance
indirect stakeholder values (ex. driver safety)

New technology doesn't always benefit everyone equally, so we want to do our best to look at new features in a principled way.

Adding Community Transit to OneBusAway

2010-05-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

We are often asked when we'll be adding Community Transit (CT) to OneBusAway. The answer is a little complex:

CT doesn't currently have GPS on their buses. They are piloting a project hopefully starting sometime in 2010 or 2011 to start adding tracking capabilities to their fleet. So, it could well be years before the fleet has tracking capabilities. Therefore, there won't be real-time tracking for CT, in OneBusAway or otherwise, in the near future.

It is possible for us to add CT's static schedule data to OneBusAway. You wouldn't know if the bus was late or early, but you would be able to see the scheduled arrivals by stop in the OneBusAway format that you are used to. However, given the current budget constraints, CT has had significant IT cuts and is strapped for time to add new endeavours to their plate.

That said, if you'd like to see static schedule data for CT in OneBusAway, the best bet is to send CT an e-mail to let them know that this is a priority for you at riders@commtrans.org.

Are there other agencies you would like to see added to OneBusAway? We can't make any promises yet, but let us know and we'll add them to the list to start looking into.

The Bleeding Edge: Help Test New Features

2010-05-18T15:35:00.001-07:00

I've been hard at work on some new features that will hopefully make life easier for users of the OneBusAway phone and SMS interfaces, along with laying the foundation for some exciting new features to come.

But before I tell you exactly what's new, I'll warn you that the new features are beta enough that they can't be found on the main OneBusAway website, phone-number, or SMS interface. I'm looking for people to try out the new features and find the bugs before we go live for everyone. If you are feeling brave, read on for more info.

So what's new?

User accounts: you can now login to OneBusAway
Bookmarks: manage your phone and SMS bookmarks from the web

The bookmarks feature is neat because it let's you setup bookmarks with:

multiple stops
custom bookmark names
route filters

This can be especially useful for the phone and SMS interfaces, where space and bandwidth are tight and you really want to limit the information you see from OneBusAway.

Sound cool? Want to try it out? Great! The trick is to use the following:

Instead of onebusaway.org, use http://soak.onebusaway.org/
Instead of calling 206-456-0609, call 253-802-0126
Instead of texting with keyword "onebus", use keyword "twobus"

Give a shot and let me know what you think by emailing contact@onebusaway.org. Thanks!

OneBusAway in the News

2010-04-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

OneBusAway has been mentioned a couple of times around the web recently:

Tacoma Tomorrow talks about their experiences with OneBusAway
Seattle 24x7 has an interview with me about OneBusAway
An IBM Developer Works article talks about a variety of transit tools, including OneBusAway
The Transportation Northwest Newsletter has an article about OneBusAway (PDF)

And as a bonus, here is a cool visualization of OneBusAway usage over the course of the day for the iPhone app. Every time someone requests information for a particular stop, we flash a dot at that location. Watch how things explode for the morning rush-hour:

Help Others Help OneBusAway

2010-04-16T15:05:00.001-07:00

Some fellow grad students here at the University of Washington are doing some research into how we here at OneBusAway handle feedback, suggestions, and other requests from you, our users. They've got a quick survey you can take to help them with their project.

As a grad student myself, I encourage you to take the survey : )

OneBusAway is a finalist for Best Nonprofit Startup in Seattle 2.0 Awards

2010-04-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

We're honored to announce that OneBusAway is a finalist for Best Nonprofit Startup in the Seattle 2.0 Awards. But to take home the award, we need your vote! Take a moment and vote for us now:

Seattle 2.0

New Features You Might Have Missed

2010-03-24T11:27:00.000-07:00

In addition to many of the big changes to OneBusAway from last weekend, there were a couple of small new features that I wanted to mention that will hopefully make OneBusAway work even better for you:

Arrival Alerts

I have a common problem where I check my stop from my computer, see it's coming in 10 minutes, and figure "Oh I've got five minutes to check my email before I need to leave." I then proceed to get distracted and forget to check again until the bus is almost here and I end up sprinting to the stop. It's a vicious cycle.

To help break the cycle, we've introduced simple arrival alerts. To activate an alert, browse to your stop page as you normally would (note that this feature only works in OneBusAway's standard web interface):

Click on the minutes-until-arrival for a particular trip and you'll bring up an arrivals alert page for that trip:

You can set an alert to go off a certain number of minutes before the bus is predicted to arrive, either playing a sound or popping up an alert. Just leave the browser window open in the background while you user your computer, and you'll get an alert when it's time to go catch your bus.

Multi-Stop Views and Route Filtering

For some riders, there is often more than one bus that can get you to your destination. If the buses pick up at different stops, you can check each stop individually in OneBusAway to see which bus is coming next, but wouldn't it be nice to see both stops in one combined view with just the routes you care about? Now you can.

If you click on the new "See multiple stops and filter routes" button at the bottom of any standard web interface real-time arrival stop page, you'll bring up a screen where you can select multiple stops and filter which routes you'd like to see:

You can add and remove stops and pick just the routes you want to see. This can be particularly useful for busy stops that have lots of routes where you only care about one or two. When you have everything the way you like it, click "Click to view your custom stop view" and you'll be taken to a customized stop view that you can bookmark for easy access in the future.

SMS Bookmarks

Users of the OneBusAway phone system have long had the ability to bookmark stops for quicker access in the future. We've now added that feature to the SMS interface as well. This means you don't have to remember long stop numbers any more. Also note that these bookmarks are synced with your phone bookmarks as well.

For more details, check out the SMS page.

That's All for Now

We hope you find these new features useful. As always, let us know if you run into any issues.

Big Changes to OneBusAway: Pierce Transit Routes Now Included

2010-03-20T00:21:00.000-07:00

I'm happy (and a little scared) to announce some not-so-minor changes to OneBusAway. Happy because those changes finally bring real multi-agency support to OneBusAway, including real-time data for Pierce Transit. It's been almost a year since my first meeting with PT to discuss the possibility of adding their routes to OneBusAway and through a lot of work on both sides, it's finally come to be.

I'm also a little scared because multi-agency support means a new codebase (and new bugs) along with some subtle changes in how you interact with OneBusAway. The biggest change is that since there are no longer just King County routes in OneBusAway, some things are not so simple. When you search for "route #1", did you mean the one for King County Metro or for Pierce Transit or possibly for some other agency we add in the future? Most of the changes deal with making sure you get information tailored to your needs.

What kind of specific changes am I talking about?

If you are using the iPhone or Android app, the good news is that there are no changes at all. These apps were designed with multi-agency support from the start. You should just start seeing Pierce Transit stops and routes showing up in your searches.

If you are using any of the web interfaces (standard, mobile, or text-only), there are two big changes:

The form of stop urls have slightly changed because stop ids now have an agency prefix. We will automatically detect the old style of url and redirect you to the appropriate new url with a quick message explaining that you should update your bookmarks.
We remember a default search area for each user. Similar to how Google Maps remembers your default search location, we remember your search area and return routes and stops appropriate to you when you perform a search. We chose to go with a default search location, as opposed to a default transit agency, since most of the local agencies have overlapping service coverage and many users ride routes from multiple agencies over the course of a day.

The phone and SMS interfaces have been similarly changed to support a default search location. The first time you use the system, you will be prompted to enter your zip code so that we can provide results appropriate to your area.

The default search location is tied to a new user preferences system that will be the basis for a number of interesting new features for OneBusAway. In the future, I'm hoping to have synchronized stop bookmarks and route preferences across all the OneBusAway interfaces, as well as customized notifications and alerts.

Of course, I understand that some users may not be comfortable with OneBusAway storing personal preferences like their default search locations. As such, I've made it easy to reset your preferences or to opt out completely if you wish. OneBusAway will work just the same; you may just have to provide a little more information when doing searches for new routes and stops in the future.

All in all, these are some major changes to the site. If you run into any issues with the transition, definitely let us know. We are committed to making it easier to take public transit and we think the new features we're providing will help with that goal.

Thanks again to all the staff at Pierce Transit who were involved in making their schedule and real-time information available.

Best Week Ever

2010-03-08T10:09:00.001-08:00

Last week was a good week for OneBusAway. Let me tell you all about it:

First, we launched a redesign of the website. Though I make no claims to a glowing future in web design, I hope you'd agree that it's an improvement. At minimum, it makes it easier for us to highlight our ever-growing list of tools.

We also found out last week that our research paper "OneBusAway: Results from Providing Real-Time Arrival Information for Public Transit", to appear at CHI 2010 in Atlanta, was a best paper award nominee (given to the top 5% of submissions). There is hope that I may graduate after all! Check out the paper at our research page.

In other research news, we also learned that we're going to be receiving a number of Android phones from Google that we plan of using for a big user-study we're working on for this summer in the Rainier Valley under the guidance of Transportation Choices Coalition. More on that later.

Finally, I'm happy to announce that OneBusAway was a winner at the annual Washington Technology Industry Association awards, where we took home the prize for "Best Use of Technology in the Government, Non-Profit, or Educational Sector". More details can be found at the WTIA's website.

All told, it was a busy week for OneBusAway (and I'm not even counting the hours spent hacking preparation for what's coming this week). Thanks to all our users for making us such a success!

In Defense of MyBus

2010-02-09T22:56:00.000-08:00

In a post on Sunday, I attempted to explain why OneBusAway service had been spotty ever since the King County Metro services changes on Saturday, February 6th. That explanation put a lot of the blame on the MyBus service, which provides the AVL feed used by OneBusAway. One of the MyBus maintainers took serious exception with me placing all the blame on them, and rightly so.

MyBus started as a research project at UW over a decade ago by EE Professor Dan Dailey. Dan and a couple of his associates have been keeping MyBus running ever since on their own time without any compensation and without much thanks. Without their work, we wouldn't have any real-time tracking information for King County buses and we wouldn't have tools like OneBusAway. I'm grateful for their work and I apologize for suggesting that they care any less about improving public transit for King County riders.

My bigger issue is that tools like MyBus and OneBusAway are increasingly services that King County transit riders depend on every day to use the bus. When OneBusAway has issues, I hear about it. Heck, I'm a OneBusAway user myself. When OneBusAway is down, I barely remember how to get home. [Also my wife hassles me]

One of the points I was trying to make in my original post is that Metro has an internal AVL feed that is (in my understanding) very similar to the one maintained by MyBus, with the exception that they have staff paid to keep it up to date with the latest schedule data. If that data was exposed to developers like me, there would be less downtime for users of systems like OneBusAway. Of course, Metro has their own reasons for not exposing the feed, one of which is that they have limited resources themselves.

Nobody is getting rich providing real-time arrival information for King County buses, but a lot of riders are finding it much easier to ride the bus when we do. As long as that's the case, I'll keep fighting to provide services like OneBusAway and I appreciate the efforts of the MyBus staff and staff at King County Metro who help make it all possible.

SeattleBusBot is now the Official Android Client of OneBusAway

2010-02-08T23:01:00.000-08:00

I'm proud to announce that OneBusAway now has an official Android client. SeattleBusBot, a native Android client for OneBusAway, is becoming the official Android client for OneBusAway. You can find the app by searching for "OneBusAway" in the Android Marketplace.

SeattleBusBot was written by local Seattle developer Paul Watts. The app combines a lot of the same features found in the OneBusAway native iPhone app, but has some new bells and whistles too, such as bus arrival alarms and route bookmarking. And just like OneBusAway, the app is open source too.

What do these changes mean? Paul will still be the lead developer on the Android app, but he'll be rebranding it as OneBusAway over the next few weeks. I'll be doing more to publicize the app to OneBusAway users with Android phones. Finally, we're hoping that by combing our resources, we can do an even better job of providing King County riders with great tools that make it easier to use public transit.

Why Real-Time Tracking is Always Broken After Service Changes

2010-02-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

If you've been using OneBusAway this weekend, you've probably been noticing a lot of "scheduled arrivals". That is, buses that don't have any real-time tracking data available, meaning the best we can do is to show you when the bus is scheduled to arrive. What gives?

You've probably also heard about King County Metro's service changes, which went active on Saturday, February 6th. When big service changes like these go into effect, a lot of the underlying schedule data changes, which means systems like King County's own Tracker and Trip Planner, as well as OneBusAway, need updating. I pushed all my changes on Saturday morning, so most of you shouldn't have noticed any out-of-date data.

Unfortunately, my source for real-time arrival information, the http://mybus.org/ data feed, still hasn't been updated. How can you tell? Compare real-time arrival information for the 44 between MyBus and King County's own tracker:

http://mybus.org/metrokc/avl.jsp?id=3004

http://trackerloc.kingcounty.gov/avl.jsp?id=3004

As of 12:30 pm on Sunday, Feb 7th, lots of "No infos" from MyBus and plenty of real-time info from King County. The fact that MyBus still thinks there is a route 194 is another clue.

In the meantime, OneBusAway is left in the lurch waiting for MyBus to be updated. Of course, King County Metro has already updated their internal tracker feed, but thus far, I haven't been able to convince the powers that be at Metro to give me access.

Either way, my apologies for the disruption in service. Hopefully, when you catch the bus to that Super Bowl party this afternoon, you'll have nothing but on-time arrivals.

We Win Awards

2010-01-22T01:11:00.000-08:00

Or at least, we are nominated for awards. It was announced last week that OneBusAway is a finalist in the Washington Technology Industry Associations (WTIA) Industry Achievement Awards. We've been nominated in the category of "Best Use of Technology in the Government, Non-profit, or Educational Sector". We are honored that we've even been included amongst the distinguished set of finalists and we're keeping our fingers crossed for when the winner is announced on March 4th.

In other news, OneBusAway was also included in Seattle Magazine's Best of 2009 list. In a funny contrast to our WTIA categorization of govt-non-profit-and-ed, we were actually included in the Shopping and Style section (look towards the end of the article) as one of the best local iPhone apps. The best part about the award is that we get a cool window decal, just like you see in the window of your favorite local restaurant. Except we don't have a window! I'm thinking of sneaking it onto the doors of the UW CSE building... don't tell anyone.

We Do Research

2010-01-22T00:22:00.000-08:00

You may have noticed a new "Research" link up at the top of the OneBusAway. I'm actually a grad student at the University of Washington working on a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering. Working on a Ph.D. means doing research and while OneBusAway is first and foremost about helping out bus riders like you and me, it also supports a number of interesting research efforts here at UW.

This was not always the case. When I look back to a year ago, I was working on OneBusAway as a personal side project and worrying about getting kicked out of grad school for spending too much time hacking on OneBusAway. That's why it's so remarkable that we now have a number of papers published on various aspects of OneBusAway and I'm making solid progress towards graduation (though I still worry about getting kicked out of grad school for spending too much time hacking on OneBusAway). You can check out all our work on our research page:

http://onebusaway.org/research/index.html

My colleagues at UW working directly on OneBusAway include Kari Watkins, a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Alan Borning, one of my advisors in Computer Science and Engineering.

What kind of research do we do? Kari's work falls into the area of transportation research, while mine is generally in the area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). I'm most excited about our latest paper, which has been accepted at CHI 2010, a competitive HCI conference. The paper reports on some survey work we did of OneBusAway users. You might be one of the 480+ respondents who took a survey last August asking about how you used OneBusAway and how your perceptions and usage of transit had changed as result of using OneBusAway.

If you are a dedicated user of OneBusAway, the results probably come as no surprise: users of OneBusAway showed a number of positive changes. For example, 92% of users reported an increase in overall satisfaction as result of using public transit.

What's more, users of OneBusAway reported using public transit more frequently and spending less time waiting for public transit. Users of OneBusAway also reported an increase in feelings of safety and even reported walking more.

The safety result is interesting, as real-time tools like OneBusAway support riders who might need to make a decision about waiting for a bus late at night in a sketchy area. The result about walking was unexpected, and we did some further surveys to figure out why users were walking more. Users reported that OneBusAway allowed them more flexibility in deciding when to walk to a different stop without worrying about missing a bus that might be just around the corner. Some users walked to find a faster route home and others for exercise, among various reasons given.

Our results join a growing body of work that support the value of real-time transit information to riders. However, our results come with the regular caveats of self-report bias in the survey results and lack of control group. That's while our next project is focused on using instrumented smart-phones to create a very accurate picture of how selected study participants are using public transit. What is the exact tipping point between when someone gets in a car vs when they take a bus vs when they walk to their destination? We hope to help answer that question.

I consider myself lucky as a grad student that I've found a research project that is not only leading to a publication or two, but is also immediately useful to my community. Now all I need to do is graduate at some point!

Changes to data from King County Metro

2010-01-09T14:41:00.000-08:00

One of the other big changes in the last week is the move to a new data source for King County Metro. Traditionally, schedule data has only been available as a raw database dump from KCM's scheduling system. In the transit hacking world, the Google Transit Feed Spec (GTFS) is pretty much the ad-hoc standard for exchanging schedule data. GTFS is the format internally used by OneBusAway and I wrote a converter for KCM's custom data to get it into GTFS.

KCM, hoping to encourage developers to work with their data, held a developer workshop last October where they announced the availability of their own GTFS feed. While the feed is a big improvement, it still has a number of issues (holiday scheduling errors, route label errors) that I got a chance to work on over the winter break.

The upshot is that OneBusAway is now using KCM's GTFS feed with some custom modifications. The modifications include better stop names, fixes for interlined routes downtown and at UW, and finally correct holiday scheduling information.

Let me repeat that: we've got a fix for the interlined routes issue. This has been a major problem with KCM's data in OneBusAway since day one. To quickly summarize, a number of downtown Seattle routes enter downtown as one route and leave as another. The tricky part is where they make the switch. Most routes in practice switch right before they enter downtown. Unfortunately, KCM's schedule database often showed the switch happening well into downtown. The upshot is that many people would check OneBusAway for a particular route and not see it because it was mislabeled in the system. For example, as a Ballard resident, I'd often check for a route 15 or 18 from Pioneer Square, but see route 21 and 56 instead. This affected a ton of routes:

1 => 36, 10 => 12, 11 => 125, 12 => 10, 124 => 26, 124 => 28, 125 => 11, 13 => 2, 13 => 3, 13 => 4, 131 => 24, 132 => 19, 132 => 24, 15 => 21, 15 => 22, 15 => 56, 15 => 57, 17 => 27, 18 => 21, 18 => 22, 18 => 56, 18 => 57, 19 => 132, 2 => 13, 2 => 3, 21 => 15, 21 => 18, 22 => 15, 22 => 18, 222 => 233, 23 => 28, 233 => 222, 236 => 238, 24 => 131, 24 => 132, 249 => 921, 26 => 124, 27 => 17, 28 => 23, 3 => 13, 3 => 4, 33 => 39, 39 => 33, 4 => 13, 4 => 3, 43 => 44, 49 => 7, 5 => 54, 5 => 55, 54 => 5, 55 => 5, 56 => 15, 56 => 18, 65 => 67, 68 => 31, 7 => 49, 921 => 249

Through some additional data made available by KCM and through data collected on our own, we've written a tool to fix KCM's schedule data to fix the interlined routes issue.

That said, even though the feed comes with a ton of fixes, there are also some issues with the data. For example, I've gotten a couple of reports of bad data for the 255 headed to Kinsgate. If you notice anything, definitely let us know.

Changes to the OneBusAway iPhone App

2010-01-09T12:49:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks for OneBusAway. There have been a number of changes, both major and minor, that hopefully improve the usefulness of OneBusAway. In this post I'm going to talk specifically about changes to the OneBusAway iPhone application.

In late December, the OneBusAway iPhone app 1.0.1 update went live in the app store. This was primarily a bug fix release. First and foremost was a work-around for some bugs in Apple's CoreData database libraries that was causing random crashes of the app. The bug was a bear to track down, but based on crash-report data I'm getting from Apple, it seems to have done the trick.

In addition to the bug fixes, there were a few minor UI tweaks. For example, when we don't have arrival prediction data for a bus (listed as "scheduled arrival" in the UI), we also change the color to black to make it more obvious. See Link light-rail in the following figure, for example:

In addition, we made some changes to stop icons that no one probably should have noticed until about 10 minutes ago. See if you can spot the change:

That's right, you're seeing light-rail and heavy-rail icons! What changed?

The big change is that after six-month of hacking, we're now running OneBusAway with multi-agency support! To kick things off, we've added a lot of additional Sound Transit data. That means, for example, that you can see the Sounder schedule using the OneBusAway iPhone app:

More new agencies are hopefully coming soon (Pierce Transit for starters), but we wanted to start small to make sure there were no major bugs. Note that the additional Sound Transit data is only active in the iPhone app (and any other apps that use the OneBusAway API). We're working to get it live on the main website soon.

Though we've done our best to make these changes seamless, there's always the chance for bugs. If you notice anything weird or have any problems, be sure to let us know. In the meantime, thanks for using OneBusAway!

OneBusAway Winter of Code 2009

2009-11-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

OneBusAway is open-source software. One of the reasons that I went the open-source route was to give the community the opportunity to help improve OBA themselves. When we notice something annoying with the tools provided by our local transit agencies, there is often not much we can do to fix them, except send an email and wait. However, with open-source tools, we can pull up our sleeves and fix what bugs us directly.

And it works. I've accepted patches from fellow developers that have extended and improved the functionality of OneBusAway in interesting ways. However, as the OneBusAway code-base gets more complex, it can be a little intimidating for new developers to join in. Where should they start?

In order to address this issue and get more people involved in OneBusAway development, we're announcing the OneBusAway Winter of Code 2009. Similar to the Google Summer of Code, we've identified a number of tasks, both large and small, to get developers started with hacking on OneBusAway.

Here's a chance to put your code hacking skills to use for the good of the community: by helping improve the usability of public transit.

If you are interested, you can find more details here:

http://code.google.com/p/onebusaway/wiki/WinterOfCode2009

The sign-up deadline is Wednesday of next week, December 9th.

If you've ever been frustrated waiting for the bus, here's your chance to make a difference.

For Those of You Without iPhones

2009-09-23T20:32:00.000-07:00

First off: to those of you with iPhones, thanks for downloading the app and for all the great reviews. We've had over 2,700 downloads in the first week and a ton of 5-star reviews. Thanks for all the support!

Now, for those of you without iPhones: I've gotten a number of comments from people asking me when the Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Pre, Nokia, etc version of the OneBusAway app is going to launch. While I would love to write native apps for all these platforms, the reality is that there just aren't enough hours in the day for me to make it happen. While some other developers ARE working on native apps for various other platforms (see a list here), I'm going to be taking a different approach that should hopefully be useful for a larger number of platforms.

Specifically, I'm writing a smarter, mobile-optimized web-app that should have most of the same features as the native iPhone app (maps, geolocation, bookmarking, filtering, better search, etc) but run in a web browser. The real key here is that enough mobile browsers are finally starting to support geolocation (GPS, etc) within the browser (see this list of supported platforms), meaning we don't have to write a mobile app for each device.

While a mobile web-app will never be quite as polished as a native app, I think the experience should still be pretty good. Plus, it's much easier for me to quickly add features to a web app that everyone can enjoy without a two-week wait for even simple updates to the iPhone native app.

Now, normally I prefer not announcing a new feature until I've actually written it, but I'm spilling the beans because I've committed to having a demo ready for a late October conference deadline, so I might as well commit to the rest of you as well ; )

Any comments? Feedback?

Service Revision Bugs

2009-09-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

A number of you have let me know of various bugs in the data from the latest service revision (route 174 should be removed, misnamed stops, bad schedules, etc). However, the biggest issue by far is that real-time arrival data is missing for a number of routes and trips (some 12+% of trips are affected) .

The problem is that AVL data from King County Metro and schedule data from King County Metro are currently mismatched for a number of routes. I've been in talks with KCM and I'm hoping to get the issue resolved on their end ASAP. In the meantime, I'm going to try to hack together a temporary work-around to be put in place later tonight.

Specific routes that are probably affected:

1, 2, 5, 7, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 36, 37, 42, 49, 54, 55, 76, 77, 106, 118, 119, 124, 174, 984, 994, 995

Sorry for inconvenience. Be glad this only happens three times a year!

King County Metro September Service Revisions

2009-09-17T02:37:00.001-07:00

I just pushed the King County Metro September service revisions to OneBusAway. This should hopefully bring everything up to date for the changeover this weekend and fix a few bugs people have found in the current schedule.

However, I've already noticed some new bugs with the new schedule data. If you find any of your own, please let us know.

I'd also point out that Link Light Rail schedule data was included with the update. Metro calls it the 599, so be on the lookout. You can look at the full route here. Sadly, I don't yet have real-time arrival data for Link (bu I am working on it!), so you'll have to settle for static schedule data for now. I'm curious how the schedule matches up with actual train operation. If you are able to compare, please let me know what you find.

P.S. Note that the iPhone app isn't using the new schedule data yet, but I will push the update to that tomorrow night.

OneBusAway Native iPhone App

2009-09-15T16:52:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited to announce that the OneBusAway native iPhone app has been accepted by the Apple iTunes App Store!

Goto the Apple iTunes Store to download the app

Features include:

Real-time arrival arrival information for public transit.
Map display of stops and routes.
Nearby stops search for location-aware devices.
Bookmarks and recent stop history.
Search for stops by route, address, and stop number.
Did I mention that the app is FREE?

It's everything you love about OneBusAway and your iPhone in one happy package. I've been using the app for a month or two now and I think it has really made transit that much easier to use.

I wanted to take this opportunity to thank all the beta-testers who tried out that app and provided feedback. Special thanks to John Jensen for his contributions to the app and my advisers at UW for not kicking me out of school for working on OneBusAway ; )

You can find more details about the application at our app support page:

http://onebusaway.org/where/iphone.html

If you have any issues with the app, definitely let us know.

The app is also open-source. Want a new feature added? Take charge and write it yourself. Check out the project page for more details:

http://code.google.com/p/onebusaway-iphone/

OneBusAway Survey

2009-08-19T15:27:00.001-07:00

Help us understand how you use OneBusAway. Take a quick survey for a chance to win an iTunes gift certificate.

Take the Survey

New Feature: Simple Arrival Notification - Looking for Feedback

2009-06-03T23:53:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-30T09:18:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-15T01:35:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-31T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-30T00:08:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-09T21:55:00.001-07:00

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

2009-02-27T07:41:00.000-08:00

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.

Snow Event

2009-02-26T06:55:00.000-08:00

For the latest updates, check out the OneBusAway twitter feed.

It snowed this morning, which means your morning commute is likely not going to be a bundle of sunshine. The first victim seems to be the Metro Tracker feed, which as of 6:50 am, seems to have gone off the rails. See http://trackerloc.kingcounty.gov/avl.jsp?id=316 for an example, where every route is either no-info or 45 minutes late+. I can't tell if the tracker is broken, or all those routes just aren't running due to adverse weather cancellations. The Metro adverse weather page only lists two routes on re-route at the moment (http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/rr/adverseweather.html), but if the last Snowpocalypse event is any indication, it's not clear this webpage is updated in a timely manner.

For a gentle introduction on why the bus tracker doesn't work well in the snow, check out http://code.google.com/p/onebusaway/wiki/AdverseWeatherReroutes.

We Tweet

2009-02-13T07:27:00.000-08:00

Did you know OneBusAway is on twitter? Check us out at at http://explore.twitter.com/onebusaway.

They say that Twitter is what you make it, so we've mostly been using it in a customer service fashion. Specifically, we keep tabs on mentions of OneBusAway on Twitter and try to respond when people are having problems. We also occasionally post service notices when things are down or wonky and it's not worthy of a full blog post.

In the future, we'd like to add services notifications about temporary route changes and other issues using Twitter. Either way, we're just as new to Twitter as anyone else, so it'll be interesting to see how it all evolves.

"The actual time of arrival of buses is different from the calendar, even in a law-abiding American."

2009-02-13T00:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the UW News article and press release from last week, OneBusAway has gotten some major press and new traffic this week. I've done interviews with Q13 and KOMO TV, KIRO and KOMO news radio, and it looks like I will be on KUOW's The Conversation next Wednesday at noon along with Kari. Exciting stuff.

The article was even translated into Russian! The translation back to English by Google is pretty hilarious as well (see this post's headline for an example). Either way, just call me Брайана Ферриса (I think).

All this press has also meant a crush of new users. We easily beat our busiest traffic day from the Snowpocalypse of 2008:

We're also approaching 1,000 phone calls answered a day and I think we'll easily break the 30k total phone calls answered since launch next week.

Mostly I'm just happy OneBusAway hasn't crashed under the increased load. There were and still are some issues with the Feb 7th service revision I'm trying resolve, but the transition seemed to go mostly ok. Just like last September's service revision, I happened to be out of town for the transition, which made thing a little tricky (September was my honeymoon in Iceland... last weekend was DC with friends).

Either way, I welcome all the new users to the site. I hope you find it useful.

Feb 6th Schedule Bug

2009-02-06T09:06:00.000-08:00

My apologies to anyone who had a "No scheduled arrivals in the next 30 minutes" message show up this morning when there were clearly buses on the way. There was a scheduling bug in the database having to do with this weekend's service updates by Metro that made it look like no buses were in action today.

I fixed it a few minutes ago. Let me know if you have any issues.

OneBusAway mentioned in University Week

2009-02-04T22:50:00.000-08:00

We had a nice article about OneBusAway written up in University Week, the faculty and staff newspaper of the University of Washington. Check it out.

3rd Avenue Heartache

2009-02-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

I've gotten a couple complaints about OneBusAway sometimes missing buses downtown. The bus will arrive at the stop like it's supposed to, but there will be nothing listed on OneBusAway. Pretty frustrating, I agree. It's taken me a while to track down the issue, but I figured I'd try to describe what is going on.

The short of it:

For routes that enter downtown as one route and continue from downtown as another route (an interlined or through route, according to my more transit savvy friend), the transit database from Metro that feeds OneBusAway often defines that change-over happening in a different place than where is happens in practice on the actual bus. Often OneBusAway is actually listing the bus you care about, but it's labeled as some other route that you wouldn't normally recognize.

I'm working on a fix, but it's a pretty complex issue. For now, I'm working to identify all the routes where this is an issue. If you know of a specific route where this is an issue, feel free to let me know in the comments.

The long of it (only real transit nerds may want to read past this point):

Consider route 26 heading from downtown to Greenlake. You can see the route map here:

http://onebusaway.org/where/standard/index.html#m(route)route(26)block(NORTH)

The 26 serves four major stops along 3rd ave: Yesler Way, Columbia St, Seneca St, and Pike St. You can see the full schedule for the 26 at 3rd and Pike here:

http://onebusaway.org/where/standard/schedule.action?id=578 (this page take a while to load...)

There are a huge number of trips for the 26 at 3rd and Pike. Now compare that to 3rd and Columbia here:

http://onebusaway.org/where/standard/schedule.action?id=538

There are hardly any trips for the 26. What's going on? If we look at the 4:05 pm trip at 3rd and Pike:

http://onebusaway.org/where/standard/trip.action?id=10741093&stopId=578

We see that the trip starts at 3rd and Pike, but is preceded by Route 42:

http://onebusaway.org/where/standard/trip.action?id=10741258

So this is what is happening. A large number of outbound 26's from downtown are actually inbound 42's that switch to 26's along 3rd Ave. According to Metro's transit database, that switch happens at 3rd and Pike, after the bus has already passed the other stops along 3rd Ave. The problem is that this is not what actually happens in the real-world. When that 42 pulls onto 3rd Ave, the driver has already switched the bus' sign to read Route 26. In addition, all the stop kiosk signs along 3rd Ave list the 26 as well. For example:

It actually make sense that the 42 should change into the 26 before it goes down 3rd Ave, since all the commuters are looking for the 26 to take them home. If they had to remember that the 42 is going to switch into the 26 in a few stops, it'd be mostly confusing.

Ok so after all that exposition, here is the real problem. Even though the buses and stop kiosks along 3rd Ave are doing the "right" thing, the database does not match what's going on in reality. Thus, when a rider looks at OneBusAway at 3rd and Columbia to figure out when their 26 is going to arrive, OneBusAway will not mention the 26 but instead will list the 42. The rider is confused and thus bad things.

To make matters worse, it's only a problem for some of the 26s. If the 26 isn't preceded by a 42, it actually does the right thing and is listed as the 26 for the full length of 3rd Ave in the database.

This is not just a problem with the 26. A number of routes do a similar thing of changing route signs right before they get on 3rd, where the database shows them changing at the end of 3rd.

Real-Time Tracking is Down

2009-02-02T08:50:00.000-08:00

Real-Time tracking is currently down. Specifically, the internal tracking feed from MyBus is currently not responding. In addition to taking our real-time tracking down, it also appears that MyBus urls are not responding (for example: UW Campus Hub).

I've sent emails to appropriate parties, but it's out of my hands to fix this issue at this point. Here's hoping it's resolved sooner rather than later.

Update: Tracking seems to be back up as of 10:40 am.

Bug # 100

2009-01-29T11:48:00.000-08:00

I always like to highlight the big milestones for OneBusAway. That includes bugs.

I just entered Bug # 100 in the tracker. It deals with tracking errors for the 26E headed downtown from Wallingford. Not sure what's going on there... but I have plans to fix it. I also have plans to fix the other 27 open bugs currently floating around in the tracker. But just like your bus, fixes may come a little bit later than any of us would like.

The Perils of Operating a Service People Use

2009-01-22T14:41:00.000-08:00

I was waiting at a bus stop a few weeks ago and I was describing OneBusAway to some fellow UW students waiting at the stop with me. "That's awesome!" the exclaimed, and they immediately tried calling up the phone number to see the service in action.

Of course, the phone service wasn't working.

As luck would have it, the phone service was down for some reason. Restarting Asterisk fixed the problem, but the damage was already done. It was pretty embarrassing because (a) things were broken and (b) I had no idea.

In fact, there have been a number of times when a polite email or even a tweet was my first indication that all was not well in OneBusAway land. While I definitely encourage anyone to let me know if they are having issues with OBA, I'm happy to announce I'm taking more proactive measures from now on. I've now got a basic Nagios installation up that monitors the various services that make up OneBusAway and automatically sends out emails and text messages when things go wrong.

And while things are green across the board for now:

Things will invariably go bad. Hopefully I'll be one of the first to know about them now ; )

15k+ Phone Calls

2009-01-12T23:41:00.000-08:00

Wow... according to the logs, One Bus Away has answered over 15,000 phone calls since July. Only 225 of those were me ;)

I realize it's probably time for One Bus Away to get an official privacy policy and data retention policy. I need to give this some thought, but if you'd like to comment, add something to:

http://code.google.com/p/onebusaway/issues/detail?id=95

Phone Service Outage

2009-01-05T19:17:00.000-08:00

The phone service was down this afternoon for some amount of time. Restarting asterisk seems to have fixed it though. It's only Jan. 5th and I've already blown my chance at five nines of uptime in 2009.

Adverse Weather Reroutes

2009-01-05T06:55:00.000-08:00

You may have now noticed that OneBusAway is now displaying a 'snow' message next to some routes:

A route gets a 'snow' message if it's listed on the table at:

http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/rr/adverseweather.html

Unfortunately, I'm updating OneBusAway manually at this point, so there may be some lag between Transit's website and mine. I'm working on some automated tools to help that process, but they probably won't be ready any time soon.

New Year's Day Schedule Bug

2009-01-01T07:28:00.000-08:00

Like the Zune, OneBusAway is having its own scheduling problems to ring in the New Year. If you are using the service today, you'll immediately notice there is no real-time arrival info available for any of the routes. This has to do with a scheduling bug between MyBus on OneBusAway.

Officially, Metro is on Sunday scheduling for the New Year's holiday and OneBusAway accurately reflects that. Unfortunately, MyBus still seems to be on regular weekday scheduling. See for example:

The 74E shouldn't be running today, but it's still listed by MyBus. Unfortunately, developing a work around on my end is non-trivial and probably won't happen by the end of the day, at which point the problem will no longer be an issue. Fortunately, the next holiday service day is July 3rd (Independence Day observed) so hopefully we can get it worked out by then.

Suprise Partial Holiday Service Updates

2008-12-30T05:22:00.000-08:00

If you are like me, you were probably caught off guard by the updated Partial Holiday scheduling for the week of Dec. 29th. The official service announcements can be found on Metro's page:

http://metro.kingcounty.gov/up/holiday-service.html

The main update is that for Monday, Dec. 29th through Wednesday, Dec. 31, Partial Holiday schedules will be in effect. See Metro's website for the full list of update.

Unfortunately, I'm back in NC for the holidays and missed the announcements from Metro, so schedules were not accurate for Monday, Dec. 29th. They should be up-to-date now.

As a reminder, you can actually see full scheduling information for your stop in OneBusAway. The timetable page for a stop can be accessed on the web from real-time arrival page for a given stop:

It can also be accessed from the stop search map:

Like more than a few people, I first heard about the updates through SLOG and STB:

SLOG: Happy Holidays
STB: Screw it, we're not running this week
STB: Follow Up: Partial Holiday Service

Snowpocalypse Update

2008-12-19T01:25:00.000-08:00

So maybe you noticed it snowed today...

As mentioned on the OneBusAway arrival pages, real-time arrival predictions aren't accurate for buses on adverse weather reroute. Today that was pretty much every bus.

Yet despite the sketchiness of arrival data, today was OneBusAway's busiest by far. We almost broke the 2k visitor count. I can only imagine what kind of traffic the transit agencies were seeing.

In order to make OneBusAway a little bit more useful in spite of all the re-routes and cancelations, I'm trying to quickly add a few features. Most visible is notification of when a route has been officially suspended by Metro. Here is an example:

You can also now click on the bus destination to bring up a specific page for that bus route that contains some extra diagnostic info that might help you decide if you really want to wait in the snow for that particular bus.

Of course, the biggest problem is the re-routes themselves. As far as I can tell, re-routes are managed on the fly, which means that re-routes do not even match the suggested route listed for some routes online (see this example for Route 30).

About the only solution I can imagine is some sort of collaboratively edited map where riders (and maybe even transit operators) can updates routes to the best of their knowledge. Even better if that info can be fed automatically back into OneBusAway so it can let you know that a bus is never coming to your stop. Sounds tricky to implement... maybe tomorrow.

Finding Your Stop Number

2008-12-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

Back in the summer of 2006, I developed an early version of OneBusAway that was basically a phone interface to http://mybus.org. It was an interesting proof of concept, but kind of a pain to use because you still had to know your MyBus timepoint ID ahead of time if you wanted to get arrival info in the field.

Fast forward to early 2008 when someone mentioned to me that each Metro KC bus stop actually had the physical stop number printed on the posted schedule:

It's definitely not exactly obvious, but it's there. With a unique id on each stop, it was now possible to build a system that could map that id into arrival info for the stop and would actually be useful in the field since you could now walk up to any stop and get arrival info. This led to the development of the OneBusAway real-time system as it exists today.

Fast forward again to the September Metro KC service revision. Due to a glitch in the printing of a lot of the posted schedules, the stop number was no longer visible or it was cut off completely. This definitely doesn't help the usability of OneBusAway, but there have been a few bright notes.

First, a commenter on the Bus Chick post about OneBusAway pointed out that all the bus shelters have the stop number painted in the upper left corner. True enough:

Second, there is hope that some day Metro KC will roll out their new stop signs that more prominently feature the stop number:

Finally, OneBusAway stickers have magically started to appear at a few stops. I wonder where those came from. See this Orphan Road post for more info.

Seattle Magazine + 1k Milestone + Updates

2008-12-13T01:07:00.000-08:00

Lots of good news for OneBusAway these days:

First, OneBusAway got an article in Seattle Magazine! Honest to god print journalism... we must be legitimate now.

Second, OneBusAway had it's first 1,000 hits day on Wednesday. I know that's a drop in the bucket for major sites, but still kind of a nice milestone.

Third, I just checked in about a three-week backlog of bug fixes to the code-base. Includes some major bug fixes plus a few interesting new features. I'll try to write them up later.

Daylight Savings Time

2008-11-02T19:07:00.001-08:00

OneBusAway had a major service outage today due to Daylight Savings Time. The system did not handle the time change gracefully, so no prediction data was being listed for bus arrivals. Bug seems to be fixed as of 6:30 pm. Hopefully no more issues, but we won't really know until March 8 of 2009.

Welcome to One Bus Away

2008-11-02T18:59:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the One Bus Away blog. We'll be posting updates about development, new features, bugs, and other transit hackery.