About Bus Monster

If you would like help on using bus monster, please go here.
If you would like a technical explanation of the site, please go here.

Hi, welcome to the bus monster! I have been working on making this site in my spare time since April. I hope you get as much out of it as I have put into it.

Thanks a bunch to everyone who has helped me out while making this site. Thanks especially to everyone at the Intelligent Transportation Systems Research Program at the University of Washington for making such great software to work with. Thanks to my email contacts Brad Kittredge, Tom Braman, Pratricia Banks, and Dick Harrell at King County Metro Transit. You all were very helpful, though none of you were probably aware of it.

Thanks to Tom7 for making great fonts. The monster logo and various other images on the site are pulled from various fonts Tom7 has made.

Thanks to Sandy for helping me clean up the route maps. You are amazing.

Thanks to Greg Sadetsky for helping me find traffic info. Greg made the original Google Maps Traffic hack.

Thanks to those that have helped me test out the site.

You can email me, Chris Smoak, at: busmonst@gmail.com.

I have done my best to make the bus monster useful and bug-free, but I am very much aware that there are still kinks to be worked out. Below, you will find a list of existing bugs and new features that I am working on.

Known Bugs

  • Bus locations may stop getting updated. (This does not affect arrival time estimates.)
  • Alarms will sometimes immediately come back with an error after making them.
  • On IE, map images will sometimes stop loading when large amounts of route data are being loaded.
  • On IE, traffic cams will sometimes not reload correctly, displaying a broken image link, instead.
  • Routes are not correct for holidays.
  • When displaying a route from a "route - destination" link, the destination is ignored, displaying the default destination for that route.
  • Permalinks do not always zoom to the correct level.

Future Improvements

  • Current road congestion
  • Allow for showing only handicapped accessible stops.
  • More routes!
  • Display *all* stops along a route, not just some.
  • Directions using Trip Planner (i.e., how do I get from here to there?).

I will be releasing the source code that runs this site soon. Be ready with a fork and a bowl of marinara sauce.