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Comment by Benjo | Hacker News Reader

The Metro Transit system in Minneapolis/St. Paul realtime info:

http://www.metrotransit.org/nextrip.aspx

The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do.

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What would you want it to do? I may know some people that could change it...

I use it to check bus times on my way to and from work. There are two different buslines I can wait for, and no easy way to check which one will be coming first - I have to load each page and compare. Also, loading the site on my android phone almost always results in an error the first time - forcing me to load the page again. I haven't taken the time to debug this yet, but it's always annoying when I'm trying to check the bus times on the go.

Try using http://metrotransit.org/map/ to solve your first problem (click a stop and it will show NexTrip for all the bus routes that stop there). That doesn't solve your second problem though: I have the same problems (and my wife does on her iPhone). I have an Android app started ... maybe I should finish it. Is it worth $0.99 to you? :)

The two routes don't come to the same stop. I'm looking for an easy answer to "Should I wait on Hennepin or Nicollet?" without waiting for multiple pages to load on my phone.

I'd definitely pay $1 if I thought the app would address those two problems. Someone has on open source site for just the NexTrip API, but I haven't had success with it yet: http://metrotransitapi.appspot.com/

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