Ambient Bus Times |
December 4th, 2014 |
| bus, tech, transit |
My commute home consists of a subway and a bus. The subway is
frequent enough that I don't worry about it, but the bus runs every 20
minutes at best, sometimes longer. Plus there are sometimes delays,
and it's good to know about these before I leave work. I can check
the online bus predictions, but this takes some overhead. What if I
could have an ambient reminder of this?
I made a little
script that pulls down the realtime predictions for when my bus
will leave the station, parses out the "minutes" field, color codes it
by whether I probably have time to catch it, and prints it to my
terminal. I leave it running on a terminal in the corner of my
desktop and it looks like:
The color coding is so buses I can probably catch are yellow, buses I
can very likely catch are green, and buses I don't need to leave for
yet are blue.
I haven't used this yet, but I think it will be helpful and make me more relaxed around leaving.
Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack