Thanks, I appreciate the kind words about the utility of OneBusAway for you. You may not know this, but the people who make OneBusAway for iOS and Android are unpaid volunteers.
Thanks a lot for your great work! I'm surprised the linked article didn't mention OneBusAway, which greatly changes the experience of using a bus for me. Like many in Seattle, I live a couple blocks from a stop, use OneBusAway to time things so I don't have to wait more than a couple minutes, and -- just as importantly -- I don't ever sit there wondering whether there's any bus coming at all.
I notice on onebusaway.org that the system is now used by other cities, including NYC, Washingon D.C., and Tampa Bay. Do other large cities generally use some kind of competing, comparable proprietary system, or do bus riders in most cities have no way of getting real-time bus data online?
I believe that most major cities' transit agencies are now creating GTFS feeds[1], which can be consumed by a variety of apps and services, like Transit and Citymapper. These apps are available in hundreds of cities around the world. They also have the advantage of having millions of dollars in venture funding behind them, which I'm sure helps expansion :)
I did not know that, and I appreciate your efforts. It's one of the few apps that I know fairly consistently works, even though it's an inherently chaotic system that deals with estimation.
Is the data behind that available anywhere as an api or anything? I was trying to find a way to parse out some stuff for a project at home, and access to the times in say, json, would be helpful.
Thanks, I did too, which led me to volunteering on the iOS app a few years back. One thing led to another, and I now maintain it. I can always use more help, and I'm happy to help people who are just getting their feet wet on iOS learn more: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-iphone#picking-an-a...
n.b. I'm the maintainer of OneBusAway for iOS.