A new iPhone application being released today aims to fill the void left by the demise of the popular NextBus DC app, which went offline last year as the casualty of a fight between that program’s developer and another company that transmits transit data. But with his new app, BusTrackDC, Jason Rosenbaum hopes Metrobus riders will again have a reliable tool to find when the nearest bus is set to arrive.
“Before it died I used NextBus everyday,” Rosenbaum says.
Although NextBus competed with several other apps, Rosenbaum found that after it stopped functioning, none of the other programs available on Apple’s iOS store offered similar enough features. “There are a lot of apps that make you enter the stop number,” Rosenbaum says. Apps that function that way offer little assistance in guiding the user to the closest bus stop.
Instead, BusTrackDC uses an iPhone’s mapping capability to pinpoint the nearest stops. Tapping on one of the pins will prompt a menu of the available bus routes, along with the estimated arrival times of the next five trains.
Rosenbaum, 27, also took care to outfit his app with route maps, much as NextBus offered. Though most people don’t need to be reminded which route they take to work on a daily basis, there are those one-off crosstown trips on which Metro riders take an unfamiliar route.
As for the data, while NextBus DC got its information from NextBus Inc., a California company that collects information from transit systems around the world, including the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Agency—the app itself was developed by a third company—Rosenbaum is getting his maps, routes, and schedules directly from WMATA’s public data feed. His app uses bus stops’ latitude and longitude to map positions on an embedded Apple map. (Rosenbaum assures naysayers of Apple’s sometimes woeful map program that geospatial coordinates don’t miss.)
A quick run of the app shows it to be relatively stable, with the proper location and nearest stations popping up on the map. The times for passing-by buses on the 64 route appear to be accurate, too.
For now, BusTrackDC, which is free, is only available for iPhones, but Rosenbaum made it an open-source program, meaning that any fellow developer can download the source code and offer improvements or translate it to the Android platform.
