For the past few years, OneBusAway has been slowly growing behind the scenes, adding new cities from San Diego to Washington DC. The little Seattle app started by two PhD students at the University of Washington in 2008 has grown up to be one of the most successful open source coding projects and a source of real-time transit arrival information for hundreds of thousands of users. We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished the last few years, especially considering we’ve done it largely on volunteer efforts and transit agencies commitment to open source and open data.

Each year in January, we hold a yearly board meeting to elect new board members and bring in new project members. We also give updates about each OneBusAway region and the various apps and platforms. At this year’s meeting, it became clear that a lot is going on within our project, but one thing we could improve is communicating the great stuff that is happening to our users and interested parties (transit agencies, consultants, etc.).

Therefore, we are starting this new blog to let you all know what we are up to. We’ll periodically include posts about deployments in the various cities, new efforts with apps and new platforms, and other goings-ons with the group. We hope you enjoy reading about the project and how we are evolving. Remember that if you have ideas for us, you can always email at info@onebusaway.org.

If you’re a software developer interested in helping out with the project, you can find us on Slack (sign up at https://onebusaway.herokuapp.com/) or the OneBusAway Developers Google Group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/onebusaway-developers).  More details on the open-source project are at https://github.com/OneBusAway/onebusaway-application-modules/wiki

Ride on,

Kari

Kari Watkins

Chair of the OneBusAway Board