Live Bus App At Your Fingertips
Here is a neat new app that displays live locations of Muni buses. Click SF Live Bus to see the little boxes moving around. Kind of mesmerizing. And useful.
The Next Web found some caveats:
Location data appears to be sourced from stops, and not real time movement, so buses will occasionally scoot along a bit more quickly on the map than in real life. That and if you leave the map untabbed, but live, and return to it, the buses will spazz. Be careful.
By the way, what’s your go-to Muni app?
“By the way, what’s your go-to Muni app? ”
I use the Smart Ride app- it loads arrival times for all nearby stops and lets me favorite specific stops so I can check out how my connection is looking as I approach. It’s kind of nice because it means sometimes I’ll opt for alternate routes if it seems like something’s wonky on my normal route home. Maybe I’m imagining things, but I think it also shows more arrival times than the nextmuni page itself. That part’s handy in the morning since the 29 gets so jammed up where I live. It’s good to have a sense early on of just how bad it’s going to be/how hard I’m going to need to fight to get myself onto a crowded bus (sorry!).
Wish the map function in it could do something like the map you’re linking to, though.
i like pocketmuni
If you’re not yet on iOS6, there is an alternative app called MuniWatch, which serves the same purpose, except it shows the vehicle and block run (schedule) numbers.