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October 8, 2007
Metro Goes Mobile
You're never alone when you've got your cell phone. And now, you'll never be stranded.
Metro today launched a new Web site, optimized for mobile phones and PDAs.
The service offers a relatively easy-to-use trip planner as well as an LA Country traffic map, although the large map image is difficult to read on smaller phone screens. The site works on 90 percent of current hand-held devices, Metro claims, so we trust the early kinks will be fixed.
Check it out on your computer and you'll get the idea. Point your mobile device to metro.net/mobile and put it to use.
Soon enough, we hope Metro takes the plunge and hires NextBus, which offers real-time transit info on the fly (via GPS) for public systems such as SF Muni.
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As one who does use metro as my primary transportation, making the trip planner (which doesn't work all that well) available for mobile devices is to me far less useful than providing arrival times for the next bus, like via rapidbus.net for the metro rapid lines (which doesn't work that well either) would be. Or even just line schedules, so I don't have to lug around a stack of schedules.
When you're at the bus stop, that's what you want to know: how much longer you're going to have to wait for the next bus, so that you can check out alternative routes/and or see if time will permit a quick errand or pit stop.
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Guest #1: can't agree with you more. I must've spent 25 minutes each of the last two Sundays waiting for buses in well-served areas. The bus shelters, like nearly all in the city did not even have a map of Metro routes, much less any kind of timeline or mention of when and how often the bus runs.
Metro Rapid is a step in the right direction and yes, they do utilize GPS to provide the real-time arrival info at rapidbus.net and, theoretically at each stop as well. More on that in the middle of this study.
Equip all of those buses with GPS. It's much easier to walk to the bus stop and leave the car behind when you know how long you'll be waiting (or when exactly to leave).
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this would be a good idea if the trip planner worked well. it sometimes gives you 15 different routes.. the overall times are wrong.. the routes given aren't organized in any structure that I can make out.. and the map on the page sucks. seriously, what do these guys do during the day, they have web site developers on the pay roll..right?
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I was just thinking the other day about how handy a mobile application would be that i can choose the line number and the stop i'm at and it would tell me the next scheduled time a bus is going to stop there.
The trip planner is rather clumsy and i can't imagine it working well while i'm waiting for an evening orange line to arrive. However a page with two simple drop down menus (Line Number and stop) which would yield next (scheduled) arriving bus. Wouldn't be perfect (gps data) but would be using the timetables we already have and making it easily accessible on the go.