Using Bus Monster

Overview

Seattle Bus Monster helps you find bus stops near you, buses that are arriving at your bus stop soon, and it lets you set alarms to notify you when you need to leave to catch your bus.

Bus Monster is a meshing of the functionality provided by Google Maps, King Country Trip Planner, and University of Washington's ITS Web Services, with a touch more added in. This site with inspired by HousingMaps and BusView. Google Maps provides an easy-to-use map interface with detailed road maps and satellite imagery. Trip Planner lets you find bus stops in and around the Seattle area. And, ITS's Web Services provide up-to-the minute estimates of when the next bus will arrive at many of the bus stops in Seattle. Mix them all together and you get Bus Monster.

To try Bus Monster out, click on any of the example links displayed when you first visit Bus Monster, or whenever you reload the webpage. You can also follow along here to see more detailed examples of how to use Bus Monster.

To find bus stops near a certain location in the Seattle area, switch to "Bus Stops" and type in the address, intersection, or landmark near where you want to look. Or, without typing anything in, find bus stops near the current center of the map. Note that the format for addresses and intersections is different from Google Maps--you won't need to add a zip code or city name to your addresses. The following are examples of recognized inputs:

• 611 Pine
• 45th & University
• Sea-Tac Airport

If you specify an ambiguous location, you will be presented with multiple matches to choose from. Once you specify a recognized location, you will see the 5 closest bus stops to that location. Click on an individual bus stop to find out when the next several buses are scheduled to arrive at that stop.

Scheduled and Estimated Arrival Times

When you are looking at a set of bus stops, you have two options: you can view the 5 closest bus stops, or the 5 closest bus stops with estimated arrival times. There are about 16,000 bus stops in the Seattle area, and only about 1,000 with estimated arrival times. However, bus stops with estimated arrival times give you up-to-the-minute predictions of when buses will arrive.

Email Alarms

Alarms will alert you when a bus is some number of minutes away. You specify the number of minutes notice you want and the email address you want to receive the alert. Alarm messages are short and work as SMS messages. If you are still viewing the Bus Monster webpage when your alarm goes off, you will be informed via the webpage, as well.

Bus stops with arrival times let you create alarms for individual buses by clicking on the bus stop and when the bubble pops up clicking on "Create Alarm", clicking next to the bus you want an alarm for, and then following the instructions that pop up.

Bus Monster has most King County Metro routes as well as some Sound Transit routes that you can view and explore. All routes reflect the June service change made by Metro. If you switch to "Routes", you can type in up to 5 route numbers, separated by commas, and view these routes. Route maps will be displayed and can be changed to show various directions and local/express variations of each route. To center on a route, click on it's name.

The route map shown depends on the day of the week. Monday-Friday have different active routes than Saturday or Sunday. If your route is not showing up, make sure it runs during the current day of the week. Route maps may not be correct for holidays at this point.

Not all bus routes are available with bus monster. There are some notable exceptions that should be added soon, but many of the Community Transit and Sound Transit routes will not be available unless I can find the data necessary to show stops and route maps.

When viewing bus routes, you will not see all bus stops, only those with estimated arrival times (for now).

Up-to-the-minute bus locations are displayed for each route shown. The buses shown are changed whenever you change the route type or direction of the route map. Bus locations are based on GPS transmitters on buses, which report their location every minute or so.

Traffic Conditions

Bus Monster knows the locations of hundreds of traffic cameras around the Puget Sound area, and lets you look at any of them, automatically refreshing them for you. As you zoom in, more cameras are placed on the map, and as you zoom out, major cameras are shown. Many highway, ferry, and border crossing cameras are shown on the map.

Bus Monster pulls current traffic advisories from Traffic.com and Yahoo! and displays them on the map for you.

In the future, this section will also have road conditions displayed on the map.

More Features

Bus Monster will soon let you search for only handicapped-accessible bus stops. More routes will also be added in the near future.

You can see the full list of features I plan on adding here, and you can always send me feedback and suggest a new feature that you would like to see in Bus Monster.