OneBusAway helps thousands of people each day find their way home. Now, the popular app, started as a side project by University of Washington students, has a new home of its own.
Later this month, Sound Transit will take over operation of the popular service, which is used by over 100,000 commuters each week in the Seattle area to track bus routes.
“We hope that the transition will be relatively seamless,” writes Alan Borning, a UW computer science professor. “OneBusAway will continue to provide real-time arrival information for Metro, Sound Transit, Pierce Transit, and Intercity Transit, with schedule-only information for several others — and hopefully more in the future. Existing apps should continue to function without change.”
Sound Transit operates express bus, light rail and commuter train services in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties.
The OneBusAway enterprise service forms the basis of the BusTime system in the greater New York region. Instances of the service also have emerged in Atlanta, Detroit, and Tampa.
In the blog post, Borning writes that they will support those efforts by “making versions of the OneBusAway apps that will work in multiple regions.”
“We university types will also continue doing research on providing better and additional types of transit information (such as alerts, real-time replanning, vehicle capacity information, and others), integrating incentives for transit use with OneBusAway, crowd sourcing the detection and resolution of data problems with real-time transit data, and providing tools that seek to benefit all riders, including blind and low-vision, mobility impaired, and others,” he writes.
Previously on GeekWire: OneBusAway app scrambled, but agencies promise fixes
