What about the 66 bus?

[Steven Cabral]

It would be nice to show the 66 bus on the radar. I take that bus
everyday, it would be nice not have to wait 30 minutes at the bus
stop..

[Josh]

The current pilot makes data available for the routes 39, 111,
114,116, and 117. The primary goal of the real-time XML trial feed is
to collect feedback from the developer
community on the usefulness of the real-time arrival information
demonstrated in the program. This feedback will help the MBTA’s
technical team refine the design of a planned future system to ensure
it meets expectations. A good design up front will reduce the number
of costly changes that could be needed later on.

For a full FAQ please visit this link: http://bit.ly/5R15w

Thanks.
Josh


______________________________
Joshua K. Robin
Massachusetts Department of Transportation
Joshua...@eot.state.ma.us

MassDOT Developers Page: http://www.mass.gov/eot/developers 
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MassDOTdev 
Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/massdotdevelopers 

[N]

You can track many more (all?) buses by querying for bus locations
without a specific route:

http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command=vehicleLocations&a=mbta&t=0

The catch is, buses other than 39, 111, 114, 116, and 117 aren't
labeled with a route number. It's not terribly practical, but makes
for a nice map to see buses moving around:

http://kk.csail.mit.edu/~nickolai/mbta-bus/map.html

You can sometimes guess the route based on where the buses are going.
Right now they're all bunched up, presumably parked at bus depots for
the night. During the day it's more spread out.

Nickolai.

[Matthew Danish]

On Nov 18, 1:59 am, N <nicko...@cs.stanford.edu> wrote:
> You can track many more (all?) buses by querying for bus locations
> without a specific route:
>

>    http://webservices.nextbus.com/service/publicXMLFeed?command=vehicleL...
>

Ah, this is just the sort of feature I was going to ask about next,
though of course with proper routeTags and dirTags: the ability to get
the location of all buses on all routes with a single request.

We can see that offering the information about the location of all the
buses in Boston is not that taxing, and already (mostly) available. I
hope that the developers take this as a positive sign and look to
support it properly in the near future.

[Brendan Hickey]

Good find, Nickolai. It's nice to be able to see the #1 plodding down Mass Ave.

In keeping with bringing undocumented features to light:

The Nbus SMS gateway is live for the mbta. To use it, send a text to
41411 containing the string "nbus mbta"
For more detailed instructions: http://www.nextbus.com/wirelessConfig/sms.jsp
Thanks to Seth for pointing this out to me.

Brendan

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