I was in Edinburgh in August and the bus system had a similar service, but at the bus stops themselves. There may have been a web service but I don’t know. At each bus stop was a screen (simple old style lcd screen) that would list the next 3-4 buses due to arrive at that stop and the estimated time of arrival. What is great about this is that you know which lines are coming to that stop and can alter your route on the fly. The web site approach would benefit from the ability to view a bus stop also to see all the routes coming to that stop. Rather cool system.

Here in Oslo, Norway most buses have this system. Most bus stops lists buses stopping there, and how many minutes until the next one. The bus driver has a display showing how much he is behind schedule, and how many meters/kilometers until the next stop. And you can check in realtime where your bus is from a mobile phone with wap. Or at the website of the bus company.

If you have positioning enabled on your phone (you have to let your phone company track you), you can have the phone figure out where you are as well.

There has even been tests where you set up where you live on the web, and then - if you type “home” and send an SMS to the bus company - it will find out where you are, and send you an SMS saying “you’re at the Ibsen Street, go around the corner at take bus no. 30 coming in 4 minutes…” etc.

Finally 2006 starts behaving like those sci-fi novels with flying cars and whole meals in pills…

I see the 15 line is conspicuously absent from the new list. After waiting for 45 minutes for it last night, I can see why Muni would want to hide its accuracy from the very public that depends on it.

Even as a temporary San Franciscan (vacation last 2 weeks - nice city you’ve got there… can you do something about that hills though?) this would have been great.

Tried to see a prediction of when then next Powell-Hyde cable car would come by the corner of Powell & Bush (where i was staying) and its prediction is entirely 100% accurate: “No current prediction”

NextBus does, indeed, rock. For those living in the DC area, Metrobus is testing NextBus on seven area routes. That takes away one major reason I loathe buses: having no idea if/when they’ll arrive.

New next-train information is also available online now from the individual Metro station pages (I believe BART has had that for a while).

All I care about is the 38 (and its immensely more delightful cousin, the 38BX).

No 38, no nextbus.

Any info on how to access the “in testing” routes?

When I go to the home screen, only the “official” choices come up

In Seattle, we’ve got MyBus.org which is very similiar to NextBus, and also a Java-based Map view. Map View is cool to look at, but in practice I use the text site far more often. MyBUs also offers an SMS-based service.

The days I let the packed-to-the-gills bus pass me by and instead board the near-empty one that’s only two minutes behind it are happy ones indeed.

Hey Merlin, did you only just now receive the 3x5 note card with the news of the hidden MUNI lines? Seriously though, the electrified lines have been on NextBus as “hidden” areas for quite some time now. Over the summer Nextbus actually created some ire by revoking access to the hidden lines and a lot of people were miffed. It was soon restored. At the time, I asked Nathanial Ford (head of MTA) on a morning radio show about the issue to which he replied that anything not 100% correct or ready for primetime is not on the NextBus site. This implied that the predictions for the public lines were always correct, which, of course, they are not if you’ve used the system for any serious length of time. Given that, should one say not that having 90% correct information is better than waiting for 100% correct information? Given the context of the information (bus times, which are highly variable on traffice conditions and not exactly life or death data) I’d rather have mostly correct, visible, information over no information.

What was heard on SFist made it sound more politically biased.

The best part about the addition of the 21 is that all can see the “hilarious “irregularity of my neighborhood’s most whimsical line.