The snow is still on the ground. Selected Metro routes are running the adverse weather routes, with a few on the dreaded “unpublished reroute.”
Community Transit and Pierce Transit also have service changes. Nothing on the Sound Transit website at the moment, but you can check the website of the county where your ST bus originates to see its status. Of these, only the 522 and 582 are affected at the moment.
As ever, give yourself plenty of time to get there, don’t wait for a bus on a hillside, etc, etc.
Judging from a quick check of the 42 and 48, it would appear that onebusaway.org now can handle the printed adverse weather route, but not the unpublished ones. It may be best to just see where your bus actually is, which you can do at busview.org (which will require you to download a Java plug-in). Also make sure to enable pop-ups for that site. [UPDATE: Two commenters have pointed out that busview data is not GPS data and suffers from the same accuracy problems.]
Less than 6 months till light rail. Consider this your snow day open thread.
I personally rely on Cliff Mass’s blog
Just to be clear, I don’t think http://www.busview.org is accurate when your bus is on reroute. BusView is just a front end to MyBus AVL data. Like MyBus, it knows the published route of a given bus and it knows the current odometer reading of the bus, so it just displays the point along the route specified by that odometer reading. Just like MyBus, the routes aren’t updated to reflect reroutes, so it’s information will be no more accurate that mybus.org or onebusaway.org. There is no magic bullet until we get real GPS on buses.
All onebusaway.org is doing at the moment is displaying a note if your bus is on reroute according to http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/rr/adverseweather.html. The actual reroute information is not yet handled by OBA.
The buses don’t have GPS, so why would busview work? It’s the same data as mybus and onebusaway – just a visualization of that data (based on odometer readings).
OPEN QUESTION on Link and Metro fares: (slow news day)
When Link starts up, presumably with a functional ORCAS(tap n go payment)system in place, will Metro still have all the existing fare payment methods in place? It’s my understanding the only valid transfers between buses and Link will be with the Orcas cards (OK!). If Metro keeps a lot of the paper transfers, passes(until phased out to Orcas cards), and all the promotional stuff, and only Orcas is accepted as a valid tranfer, then a lot of folks are going to be confused.
Am I all wrong on this one?
FOLLOW ON: If Orcas is the only accepted transfer, will Sounder eliminate the TVM upgrade options for Puget Pass, paper transfer holders, to be consistent with Link and adopted Orcas fare integration policies?
I think Busview is very useful in a situation like last night. It tells you if your bus is even out there and moving.
If I’m not mistaken, GPS is coming with the new radio upgrades, but with the budget problems I don’t know if all of that is really still on schedule or not. In the meantime, BusView, MyBus, OBA, they’re all great tools but they would be even more useful if we actually knew WHERE the bus is if it isn’t on route.