Todd Stadler's blog

An engineer rides the bus (and dials his phone)

I keep discovering that people I'm talking to don't know about the wonderful invention that is the TriMet TransitTracker.

On the off chance that you (a) read this blog, (b) don't know about TransitTracker, and (c) live in or near Portland, here's the deal: you can call a phone number and, given a bus or MAX stop number, have it tell you what is arriving next at that stop.

For instance, if I dial the main TriMet number, 503-238-RIDE, press 1 for "TransitTracker arrival times", and then enter 12780 for the stop on "SW 3rd between Pine and Oak", it tells me the following bus lines and arrival times:

• 17 Holgate to 136th Ave.: arriving in 3 minutes
• 4 Division to Gresham Transit Center: arriving in 20 minutes
• ... and so on

The times are usually based on actual bus positions gleaned from GPS units on the buses, though occasionally the system loses a bus for a minute and just reports the time a bus is "scheduled at".

This real-time information is useful in several situations. I mainly use it to determine if I should run or walk to the bus stop as I leave the house in the morning (I don't have a consistent schedule at that time, and neither does the #4, it would seem). Or to figure out how much time I have left to work in the office before the next bus arrives. But it's also useful to determine which of two different buses will arrive first, and therefore which bus stop I should walk to.

The only trick to the system is knowing the TransitTracker number for the bus stop you're interested in. Many bus stops have it posted, but a few do not. And the process to get through the phone menu to learn the stop number where you're waiting is almost guaranteed to take long enough that the bus will have arrived before you've figured out when it will come.

Given that it's hard to remember the numbers for all the bus stops I use, I've stored all my favorite TriMet stops in my phone.

Of course, they all start with the same phone number: 503-238-RIDE. But I figured out that it's possible to program my way through the TransitTracker phone menu by inserting pauses (which pause for two seconds between digits) or waits (which wait for you to hit OK before sending the next digit). I'm pretty certain most phones have this ability as well.

Thus, the phone number for the bus stop at the west end of the Hawthorne Bridge (heading east) is 503-238-7433w1w3635. That breaks down into the main TriMet number, a wait for my OK, 1 for "TransitTracker arrival times", another wait for my OK, and then 3635 for "SW Madison and 1st".

I used to have pauses inserted instead of waits, but the TransitTracker system can get busy enough that it takes longer than two seconds to think, thus missing when my phone sends it the stop number.

Just to add to my little geek-out here, I'll note that I've labeled each phone number with the TriMet name for the stop, but preceded by an underscore, so that they all get grouped together at the end of my phone book (underscores go last alphabetically in the Razr). This makes them easy to browse, since I just go to my phone book and scroll up, which takes me to the end of the list.

Yeah, I know, I'm a dork. But I'm a dork who doesn't miss his bus. Unless I don't run fast enough.