Entire Muni Routes, Vehicles Visible on NextBus Site
A few months ago, we told you about the redesigned NextBus Live map, which showed little F-Market streetcar icons mulling about the city in real-time.
Well, we’re not sure whether this is a new feature for the site, or maybe we just missed it. But now on the NextBus site, you can select any Muni route (by clicking “Select Routes …”) and see entire bus routes, complete with stops and current vehicles in operation. They move in real time, too.
This is an enhancement of a feature NextBus has offered for quite some time now. It looks and works way better now. We find it helpful to see the entire route a Muni line takes, for example.
We tested the site on our Android phones (we don’t have iPhones, what?), and found that it hasn’t been customized for mobile phones yet. It works on mobile, but not fully, and not elegantly. We were able to select a different route by checking a box, but then that route didn’t load on the map, for example.
Still, any enhancement of NextBus is welcome by us. Now if only they could solve the “3 minutes … 1 minute … 17 minutes …” conundrum.
They’ve had the mive maps for years, at least all the way back to when only a handful of routes had NextBus on them.
Right, as I noted. But the enhancements (full routes shown, F car icons) are new or newish, right?
Only the F line cars are new. They always showed the routes with all of the stops.
And it always looked like this? I was only aware of the LiveMaps here.
The Google Maps version is somewhat newer, but both have been around for awhile, and they both have always had the routes/stops.
Ha. Well then, our mistake!
The arrival times are still whacked though – today I watched a 33 come and pass my stop on google maps in one window (and out the real window) while in a separate window next bus insisted it remained 17 minutes away.
I have an iPhone and the map works fine on the mobile nextbus website, complete with the route and vehicle position. Pretty cool.