Include buses that have recently passed?

[Jeff Kaufman]

A common scenario when working with bus predictions:

* Look in the app.
* See a bus for the stop in 5min and 45min.
* Walk to the stop.
* Look in the app.
* See only a bus for the stop in 40min.

This generally happens for two different scenarios:

a) They missed the bus. Maybe it was a little early or they were a
little late, but it's not coming.

b) Nextbus stopped predicting a bus at that time. I don't know why
this happens, but it seems to happen relatively often for me on the
MBTA for buses that haven't left the starting point yet.

In the case of (a) they should give up on their bus, in the case of
(b) they might want to keep waiting.

I'd like to distinguish cases (a) and (b) in my UI, and right now all
I'd be able to do is look at stops farther along the route and see if
nextbus was predicting stops for those. This is kind of awkward and
error prone, though. Much nicer would be if Nextbus could add a flag
to the predictionsForStop command like includeNegative=true that would
include in the predictions for a stop which buses had recently passed
by.

[Darwin]

You could keep track of the vehicle number of the bus when it was predicted and look up the location with the vehiclelocation command after it disappears.

------ Original message------

From: Jeff Kaufman

Date: Sun, Feb 15, 2015 12:45 PM

To: nextbus-a...@googlegroups.com;

Subject:Include buses that have recently passed?

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