Commuter Trip Plan and Point to Point Schedule offer range-oriented bus-schedule planning tools for King County Metro which can be stored on a PDA. I don’t know if these are new tools, or just ones that I missed, but they are a step in the right direction. Unfortunately, since they only output results, they are limited in utility if something goes awry while you are on the road. As far as I can tell, there is still no way to download entire route schedules for any individual route in a PDA-oriented format.
I want GPS-enabled buses and readouts on the stops that tell you when it will *really* arrive. I want a handheld program that shows a real-time map of buses as moving dots on the streets.
If the conversations I’ve overheard between drivers and Metro base are any indication, busses already have something GPS-like installed. In one instance, Metro was able to detect (and subsequently chastize via the radio) a driver for being $x minutes behind schedule.
Yep, it’s GPS… that’s how Bus Time does its’ thing.
The scenario of GPS-enabled direct supervised employment makes me very unhappy, while the idea of on-time bus drivers does not.