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n.b. I'm the executive director of the non-profit behind OneBusAway, which is an open source project used by millions of people every day to find out where their buses, trains, trams, and funiculars are, and when they'll be arriving.

If you live in a city that already has a OneBusAway server[1], you can use one of our brand new SDKs to build your own custom app experience: https://github.com/onebusAway/?q=sdk&type=all&language=&sort...

If you live in a city that DOES NOT have a OneBusAway server, we've spent a ton of time and energy this year building Docker images and OpenTofu configurations[2], which will allow you to take GTFS and GTFS-RT feeds and turn them into an easy to use REST API.

I know that BART provides GTFS and GTFS-RT feeds: https://mobilitydatabase.org/feeds/mdb-53. Similarly, every other transit agency in the United States should now be publicly sharing at least their static schedule data as GTFS due to a newish federal rule.

Also, if you're interested in hacking on software like what I described above, or on our end user-focused software, we always need more developers to pitch in—all skill levels and essentially any language.

In particular, we desperately need an iOS developer to help our 250,000 daily users get some much needed improvements.

My email address is aaron@onebusaway.org. Reach out!

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[1] New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Alexandria, Victoria, Adelaide, Buenos Aires, etc.

[2] Docker: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-docker and OpenTofu: https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-deployment



Currently there's only 9 cities supported worldwide, and of those 2 are in beta. If this software had broader reach, it may be easier to get open source support.

Having said that, I'd add my city if it were straightforward. It looks like you've spent a lot of engineering time in library and SDK support lately - I suggest investing in the DX happy path to encourage new folks to invest their time.

For example, this document is rather complicated https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway/wiki/Multi-Region


If you live in a city that already has a OneBusAway server

How do you find a list of places it's deployed. I tried Googling "onebusaway cities" which got me this page https://onebusaway.org/onebusaway-deployments/ but that doesn't list cities like Adelaide that you mention.


had to install app to check, only USA and only few places... so basically useless


See the footnote in GP's comment.


This one?

[1] New York, Seattle, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Alexandria, Victoria, Adelaide, Buenos Aires, etc.

I was trying to figure out what "etc." meant.


As an aside, being opensource is there a reason you only publish in Play store and not F-Droid?


I'd be curious if you have any insight on why the tracking apps for buses are so inaccurate - OneBusAway but also Google maps and the others. The estimates are often off in one way or another and sometimes a bus just doesn't show up at all. I assume the problem is with the source data but I'd be curious if you have insight into just what causes it to be so unreliable. I'm in Seattle FWIW




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