{"id":19113,"date":"2009-02-17T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/02\/17\/another-seattle-bus-tool-one-bus-away\/"},"modified":"2009-02-17T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T10:00:01","slug":"another-seattle-bus-tool-one-bus-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20090217-01\/?p=19113","title":{"rendered":"Another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was recently tipped off to yet another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away<\/a>, which not only provides real-time bus arrival information for every stop in the Metro system, but does so in a variety of formats. You can use the Web-based interface (which is close to what you can already get from the Tracker Location View<\/a>), but the real magic is that the information is also available via SMS, Web-enabled handheld devices, and—most important to me—any mobile phone.<\/p>\n

I have One Bus Away on my speed dial, and I’ve set bookmarks on the stops I use the most, so I’m never more than a few taps of the phone away from knowing exactly when my bus will arrive. This is a fantastic anxiety-reliever when I arrive at my stop very close to the posted time and am left wondering, “Did I just miss the bus? Or is it running late?” <\/p>\n

Bonus trivia: I had assumed that the Metro buses transmitted their locations to the central computer with the assistance of GPS technology, but in fact, it’s much lower-tech: They just transmit the current odometer reading. Since buses travel along a fixed route, knowing the odometer is enough to give you the bus location. (Assuming the bus has not diverged from the official route…) <\/p>\n

Bonus update: I used One Bus Away just this morning. I was running a bit too tight on my morning schedule, and as I hopped on my bicycle, I called One Bus Away to find out how much time I had to get to my normal bus stop. It was a bit too close for comfort, so I took a detour to a different bus stop (a little further down the route to buy me some more time) and caught the bus easily. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was recently tipped off to yet another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away, which not only provides real-time bus arrival information for every stop in the Metro system, but does so in a variety of formats. You can use the Web-based interface (which is close to what you can already get from the Tracker […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-19113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

I was recently tipped off to yet another Seattle bus tool: One Bus Away, which not only provides real-time bus arrival information for every stop in the Metro system, but does so in a variety of formats. You can use the Web-based interface (which is close to what you can already get from the Tracker […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}