· Amr Abdelfattah

Waystation Goes Live at UC San Diego

A Waystation real-time departures display on a kiosk at UC San Diego's Central Campus Station

Waystation is now live at the heart of UC San Diego’s campus. After more than a year of development, the next-generation Sign Mode for OneBusAway is running in the real world, and it’s on track to serve around 35,000 students every day.

Waystation is an open source transit display platform built as part of OneBusAway. It shows riders real-time arrivals, departures, and service alerts on digital displays. OneBusAway started at the University of Washington in 2008 and is now stewarded by the Open Transit Software Foundation, with deployments across North America including Sound Transit, the San Diego Metropolitan Transit System, and now UC San Diego.

Why Waystation

Real-time displays are one of the most direct ways a transit agency can get riders the information they need at stops, stations, and hubs. But running displays around the clock brings its own problems. The system has to be reliable enough to run unattended, flexible enough to work across different screens, and simple enough to maintain for years.

We built Waystation around those requirements from day one. It offers:

  • 24/7 operation: Kiosk mode and memory-safe update cycles keep displays stable over long stretches without a restart.
  • Support for many display types: Dynamic scaling up to 4K, multi-screen signage, and a night mode handle a wide range of hardware and lighting conditions.
  • Fault isolation: Each stop and screen polls independently, so a failure in one part of a deployment doesn’t take down the rest.
  • Real-time information: Arrivals, departures, and service alerts update continuously.
  • Multilingual and RTL support: Language support goes beyond translated strings to include Arabic right-to-left layouts.
  • Easy deployment: Waystation is straightforward to install, configure, and extend.

From Google Summer of Code to UC San Diego

Waystation started as a Google Summer of Code project in the summer of 2025. The first version, built from scratch with SvelteKit, displayed departures, arrivals, and service disruptions for a single stop.

That early work laid several foundations Waystation still relies on: multi-stop support with parallel API requests, unified departure sorting across stops, and responsive, memory-safe update cycles for continuous operation on large displays.

Over the following year, that prototype became a production platform. We added kiosk support for unattended operation, dynamic scaling, and night mode. Multi-screen signage followed, letting several displays run independently from host-configurable settings. We also expanded language support, including Arabic right-to-left layouts.

Built on the OneBusAway Ecosystem

Waystation doesn’t reinvent the infrastructure behind real-time transit information. It uses the same APIs that power the rest of OneBusAway’s apps and tools, so an agency already running a OneBusAway server can add Waystation signage without building a separate backend.

Waystation also works with OneBusAway Cloud, the Open Transit Software Foundation’s managed OneBusAway service. OneBusAway Cloud takes care of hosting, updates, and maintenance, so an agency can point Waystation at a live OneBusAway deployment without running its own server. Whether you self-host or use the managed service, the display layer stays tightly integrated with the rest of the OneBusAway stack.

What’s Next

UC San Diego is a big milestone, but it’s only the first deployment. We’re already working to bring Waystation to more campuses and transit agencies, and we’ll keep improving multi-screen support, expanding language coverage, and deepening the integration with OneBusAway Cloud.

Get Involved

Waystation is open source, and we welcome contributions from developers of all skill levels:

Whether you’re a transit agency considering Waystation for your campus or city, a developer who wants to contribute, or someone who cares about open transit software, we’d love to hear from you.

Thank You

A project like this doesn’t happen without a community behind it. Waystation began as a Google Summer of Code project, grew through a year of development and collaboration with the OneBusAway community, and has now reached its first major deployment at UC San Diego. Thank you to everyone who helped get it here. I can’t wait to see where it goes next.