BusFinder is BETA and BETTER

By Laurel McJannet

As of Noon today, our website looks different-- and that's by design.

BusFinder BETA is now live on communitytransit.org

Community Transit's web app, BusFinder, was introduced in the spring of 2014. It was the agency’s first app, allowing customers to access real-time information to help plan trips and locate our buses

Since then, technology on our buses has improved and the data provided is more accurate. Our customers have asked for (and need) better web experiences, visually and functionally, to get from where they are to where they want to be.

With all this in mind, we've rebuilt BusFinder from the ground up and now everyone can give it a test drive on communitytransit.org.

The BETA testing period kicks off today, Thursday February 20 and will last 4-6 weeks to gather feedback and identify bugs. We invite you to put BusFinder BETA through its paces and tell us what you think!

There are a total of 25 enhancements made to BusFinder and you can read all about them (and check out the FAQs) at communitytransit.org/busfinderbeta.

The video snippet below shows how some key enhancements look on BusFinder BETA (Note: the video has been sped up for this example-- buses will not be blinking on the map!)

• Buses on the map indicate that the bus is transmitting "live," real-time data.

• Data refreshes every 30 seconds, resulting in the buses moving on the map.

• Your current location is shown as the shaded circle (as long as your location services activated on your device.)

• Buses showing real-time data have a green "LIVE" icon in its route listing. To see the route from end-to-end with more information, just click on the ">".

We are very excited about this new BusFinder BETA and hope it brings useful, easy to understand, timely information to help make your bus ride better. 

So, what do you think? Will you try BusFinder BETA? How does it compare with other transit apps? Tell us in the comments!

What's Going on with BusFinder?

As you know, Community Transit is developing a real-time bus information tool called BusFinder. It utilizes the GPS tracking that was recently installed on all our buses to offer customers a fairly accurate predictive time of when a bus will leave a particular bus stop.

Believe me when I tell you it works pretty well! But not completely, yet.

As we have tested the mobile and desktop versions, we have found problems with how they interpret our stop or bus data. We also want to offer rider alerts through these tools so you can know if there are impacts to the route you will be traveling on. Getting only the route alerts that are relevant to the stop you choose was a little trickier than we anticipated.

The BusFinder by Phone tool is a completely different animal. It uses the same data, but in a different way and will provide stop times for the next five buses, whether they are real-time or scheduled times. There are several issues unique to the phone tool that we are working on.

The biggest problem we have had for all these tools has to do with the complexity of our operations. On any given day, our dispatch may drop a trip, add a trip or reassign a bus. This may be due to traffic, weather conditions, mechanical issues or other operational challenges at that time. In any case, once these changes are made, a bus may disappear, suddenly materialize or turn into another trip from a customer perspective.

We want to make sure BusFinder captures this so it doesn’t show a bus departing in 5 minutes that is not going to be there. Or show no buses departing that stop, then suddenly a bus is there. This is how our buses really operate and what you should expect from a real-time tool.

Last week, we had a major BusFinder operational systems integration test (OSIT). This involved live buses, dummy buses and even our next bus signs at Ash Way, Lynnwood Transit Center and Mountlake Terrace. To our delight, many of the operational changes we were testing showed up correctly! But not all of them.

The best I can say is that we are “getting there!” We won’t give a launch date ahead of time. It is likely that BusFinder will suddenly go live and we will use our website and social media to get the word out. Once we feel confident it works well with many customers using it, we will begin a promotional campaign. Thanks for your patience. Hang in there!