Busdrone Lets You Watch Metro Buses (and More) Move Slowly in Real-Time

Thanks to a commenter at Seattle Transit Blog, we can alert you to the existence of the cheekily-named busdrone, a Google map initially overlaid with King County Metro‘s (and some Sound Transit, when run by Metro) real-time feeds, so you could watch buses beetle about the city for amusement, and possibly travel-related purposes. Just a few days later, the creator, Andrew Filer, added the SLU streetcar and Washington State Ferries, and is on the lookout for more.

It’s a little reminiscent of how much fun it is to watch your Uber towncar smoothly tootling in your direction, though busdrone’s buses travel in little “hops” as the data refreshes. This comes very close to being that all-in-one transit view contains almost all you need to know in one glance: where the bus is, where it’s going, and what other buses are in the vicinity. You can puzzle out routes just by looking to see where the instances of other buses are. Add in a “You Are Here” pin, and Seattle’s infamously internecine transit systems could become usable for all (with internet).

The visualization represents a leapfrog of transit app stalwart OneBusAway, which leads with a map of bus stops that you then drill down to, to see bus arrivals, or even newcomer WhichBus, with that text-based location input screen. (To avoid sending you off in a fruitless iTunes search, busdrone is just a website at this point, not an app.)

A map, after all, is what you want to see if you’re not familiar with either the transit route or the city; you take in more information this way. Spotting a bus coming down a parallel street that will work just as well, for instance, is easy on this map; it’s hard to imagine how better to assemble all that in one view. It might already be worth bookmarking busdrone on your smartphone.