CRbus Update

Public transit in Cedar Rapids had a bit of a shakeup this year. With all-time record flooding in the city, our Ground Transportation center was damaged, as well as many of the neighborhoods that the buses blaze through (and some of the buses themselves).

The city has made the best of what they have. This includes a new hub at Parking Lot 44, south of the regular GTC. It also includes some new stops, less frequent buses, but also later running buses.

My iPhone optimized Cedar Rapids bus schedule, CRbus, is now up to date with the schedules posted on August 22nd. Sorry for the delay. I wasn't riding the bus much in the last few months, so it wasn't a priority for me. [CRbus was launched here]

Let me know if you find any errors in the data. The city doesn't provide the data in an easily consumable format, so there's a lot of hand editing involved.

CRbus

In my previous post, I mentioned I was working on an app for the iPhone. It's done and here it is. It's called CRbus and is an iPhone optimized view of the Cedar Rapids public transit schedule.

The app took about an hour from start to finish thanks to the great iUI framework. The data in the app took much, much longer. At the start I wrote a quick Perl script to take pasted data from the official PDFs and package it for inclusion in the app. That worked fine, other than there were a bunch of special cases in the data that I didn't want to spend the time handling in my code. I didn't think this would be a big deal, and it wasn't, until I got to those special cases and found I need a lot of hand tweaking of my data (boo). That's all done and the app is ready for use.

If you want to give this a try, you don't have to have an iPhone. Firefox and Safari will run it fine. Just hit the CRbus URL and then drag your window into the shape of an iPhone (hint: tall rectangle) to get the experience. You start with a list of routes. Follow a route to get a list of stops. Follow a stop to get the times. You can follow the bread crumb arrows at the top back up the tree.

This is just a bare bones version of what the app could be. Obvious features would include Google Maps and Transit integration, syncing with the clock in the iPhone, and even (currently disabled) next/previous stop jumps that you'll see at the bottom of the pages. We'll see if I ever get motivated to add any of those :)