Dan Bjoregren’s SpotBus! presents a quick-loading, simplified UI front-end to Metro’s Trip Planner transit information service. [via Tom]

He’s done this by stripping away the in-Metro navigation chrome, adding some pre-loaded landmark-name data to help populate the form on entry, and setting the default time of travel to the current date and time.

He notes that the project is all his, not affiliated with Metro, and I applaud his effort. Metro has some seriously good stuff available – comprehensive route schedules, the bustracker Java map that display the physical location of all busses in a given area, and more. But the services are implemented in ways that make it difficult for outside developers to do more than what Dan has done here.

I have written about this more than once.

My particular desire is that the real-time bus arrival data be made available in a lightweight, fully parsable format, so that independent developers might be able to, for example, deliver the data to the desktop in a floating ticker window. The same data could than be easily made accessible in several PDA and cell-phone oriented formats (this implementation may actually meet all my requirements), so that the user would set up a list of the usual bus stops they patronize, and on-demand, learn which buses are the next ones to arrive.

The basic code for this is already done; the people who developed Tracker at UW wrote a javascript implementation of the service. Unfortunately, I have been told that there is no way to create ad-hoc location-specific stop tickers; the feeds that power the six stops are custom-parsed server-side and no further location feeds are available, which is a shame. The service itself is physically deployed on several bus-shelters throughout the Metro service area. I corresponded with a member of the development team, who informed me that my feature request would not be met, for several reasons, not least of which being that the grant for the project had been completed and the project had no further allocated development resources. In my recollection, a request that the codebase be made open source was not responded to.