Quickly find bus arrivals

Resisting the smartphone? Here's a Twilio app to help you hold out. The idea is that you define city regions and then use region codes on your phone keypad to find the next buses going from one region to another. Unlike the standard city-provided 511 service this one is impervious to background noise, infinitely patient for you to make a selection, and aggregates predictions for all nearby stops.

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Step One: Define Regions

Think of general areas where you want to catch a bus: by your house, job, or places where it's common to make transfers. Use Google maps to find the best bus routes from A to B. Next visit nextmuni.com to obtain muni ids for the stops recommended by Google.

In the image above, the stop id 15551 is circled in red. We'll omit the leading digit of this number in the dumbus configuration.

Step Two: Create connections.csv

Its format is

region_from,region_to,stop_id,route_number

The regions are up to you, each is named by a number from zero to nine. Suppsing we had designated the Mission as region one and the financial district as region two we would add these lines to connections.csv:

1,2,5551,14

Step Three: Deploy

This program compiles into a single binary. To build dumbus, install Stack the Haskell build tool, and run this:

git clone https://github.com/begriffs/dumbus.git
cd dumbus
stack build --install-ghc
sudo stack install --allow-different-user --local-bin-path /path/for/binary

# the binary requires the mp3 file for its greeting beep
cp -R static /path/for/binary

This runs a server that listens on port 4321 and serves TwiML. Purchase a number on Twilio and create a webhook for incoming voice calls that points to http://yourserver.com:4321.

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Using the app

Assign a speed-dial key for this app if your phone supports it. When you call the app, and it answers immediately with a short beep. It is waiting for a query. They are of two forms: XY# or X# (for instance 12#).

The first will tell you the next departures from region X to Y ordered soonest first. The second form lists departures from region X to any other region.

The app will rapidly recite route numbers and times. At any point you may interrupt it with another query. It's really fast to find the best routes and transfers.