Following the introduction earlier this year of Where’s My Bus?, the real-time mobile bus arrival application for the DC Circulator bus system, today the District Department of Transportation announced the launch of its own Circulator iPhone app, available for download for $0.99 from the iTunes Store.

Somewhat similar to how the NextBus iPhone App works, the DC Circulator application allows users to figure out the closest Circulator bus stop location to where they are physically, based on GPS capability. The application requires that you select your chosen Circulator route before it will show you the closest stop, however, and the route map provided within the app is not at all interactive — it’s more or less just a static, .PDF style map that comes as a companion to the Where’s My Bus? data.

We’ve experienced a pretty wide range in terms of the usefulness of the real time Circulator arrival data that’s been available since June, and this application uses the exact same data, so there’s no improvement in that area. Sometimes, results turn up helpful information, like that a bus is only 0.3 miles from the selected stop. Other times, it just seems to turn up a bunch of gibberish about how three different buses are “finishing its previous route” while none appear to actually be headed in the right direction – and then a Circulator will just show up to pick you up anyway two minutes later. Still, for only $0.99, the Circulator iPhone app is much, much faster than the free mobile web version, which, combined with the GPS feature, makes the purchase a no-brainer, at least until someone manages to integrate NextBus with the Circulator data into a single application.