July 11, 2020

tags: programming, iOS

I don’t have a car, so getting around is a lot of riding the bus. Because of that, I’m extremely dependent on bus schedules, as they determine when and how I get to places. Seattle is lucky enough to be covered by OneBusAway, an “open source platform for real time transit info”. Their iOS app does most of the work for me, but as you might have guessed from their open-source nature they also have a publically accessible [API] that you can use for your own applications.

With that, I’ve created an iOS shortcut to get departure times for the bus stops I frequent the most.

Give your shortcut a good name, and you can even use it through Siri. I think the coolest usage I’ve found though is to set up it up with a location-based automation. That way, whenever I walk to the bus stop in question, I just get a notification on my phone with the upcoming times. Don’t recommend this though if the bus stop in question is very close to your house–geofences aren’t that precise, so you might just get a fun notification every time you come home.