All-in-One Seattle Transit-Tracker Busdrone Now on Android

Mid-May, I was tipped off to the existence of Busdrone for the desktop, a Google map overlaid with King County Metro‘s (and some Sound Transit, when run by Metro) real-time feeds, along with the SLU streetcar and Washington State Ferries.

Busdrone is the handiwork of Andrew Filer, drawing on a number of existing data sources. More recently, as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, while Filer made more improvements to the desktop version, Eric Butler ported Busdrone to Android. (Android is here; no iOS yet — it’s making its way through Apple’s approval process, says Filer.)

“This comes very close,” I wrote earlier, “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.” But Busdrone’s creators — despite the name — are dreaming bigger than buses. They’d like to get all your transportation options in there, light rail and private transit, too: car2go, Zipcar, Uber, Lyft, Sidecar. That’s great because it’s what the car-less do currently, using a number of apps to cycle through their options depending on criteria like speed or cost.

And why not, Filer and Butler ask, include “location-based realtime data about the city such as 911 Fire responses and traffic collisions“? It always makes sense not to catch the bus that’s going to run straight into gridlock, but when you’re paying by the minute (as with car2go), seeing real-time information about possible slow-downs will feel a bit like a superpower.

To get the best sense of what an incredibly useful tool Busdrone is, all you have to do is just watch it go. It’s amazing how much information is conveyed visually, right there in a single zoom-in or zoom-out view. You don’t really need to know the exact minute that bus, ferry, or streetcar is supposed to show up if you’re tracking it down the street to begin with. (Though the location of stops would be helpful.)