BUSVIEW HELP

Summary

Welcome to the Help Page for the ITS Busview program. This page is intended as a User Guide for Busview, indicating the features available and how you can access and use them. It corresponds to Busview version 01-02-2003. Busview provides real-time transit vehicle (bus!) information. Currently Busview shows buses in the Seattle, WA area as operated by the Metro King County transit agency; further agency partnerships are planned for the near future. Note that Busview runs as a Java applet, which means it can run within your web browser. There is no file download or installation process, you just need a Java-enabled browser (see System Requirements).

Map Displays

There are two basic display types available. The first is a map-based display. This display type consists of a road map, upon which bus locations are updated as the bus information is sent from the web server to the applet. By default, Busview displays all the buses, but you can choose to see only the buses on certain routes; other buses are temporarily hidden.

A variety of map navigation features are available, allowing you to view any location served by the bus network. Locations can be selected from a pre-assigned set, or you can navigate around using direction buttons and (smooth!) map dragging. Any map location can then be bookmarked, allowing it to be accessed conveniently at a later time. The bookmarked names are stored on your computer, so survive between invocations of Busview, and the names given to locations are fully personalizable. Location bookmarking in Busview is analogous to web page bookmarking in a browser environment. The user can also zoom in and out of the display, altering the scale and thus the region viewed.

Progress Displays

The second display type focuses more directly on specific bus routes, rather than showing all buses in a location vicinity. By popping up the menu associated with every map-based bus, the actual course of the selected bus can then be tracked. This is known as the bus progress display, in that it shows the progress of just the selected bus (along with any other buses which are traveling exactly the same route). A useful feature on this display is the ability to set an alarm at any point along the route. When a bus passes the alarm placement, the alarm is fired and you are notified, with a pop up dialog and a alarm sound. Place an alarm just before your bus stop, and let Busview alert you when to leave to catch your bus!

A variant on the bus progress display is the route segment display. Instead of showing the progress of a particular bus, you designate a route segment by selecting start and end points from a list of named locations (those used by the transit agency for scheduling purposes). The idea is that you are telling Busview where you get on and off your bus. Busview then automatically calculates exactly which buses on that route travel the chosen route segment. This feature is particularly useful when the agency runs several buses with a shared route number, but there exist path variations within that route. The route segment display feature "blends" these route variations together, resulting in more buses showing up on the route segment you chose. As with the bus progress display, the route segment display features alarm notification.

User Interface

The summary above provides an overall description of what Busview is and what it offers to riders. In the remainder of this guide we describe individual elements of the user interface.

The image above is a generic screen shot of the Busview applet initial view, showing the default map of the University of Washington campus. You can select another any location from maps that cover the King County area. Each black and white icon on the map represents a different bus moving along its route. In the upper right corner is a time display that shows the last time the Busview applet received data. Two editable areas are also shown. To the left is the visual filtering box, which allows you to limit the number of bus routes being displayed on the map. To the right of the visual filtering box is the route selection box, which allows you to more narrowly select segments of a route to view.
The majority of the main display is taken up by a map display, comprising a street map upon which buses are plotted. To change the area being shown, the user can press and hold down any of the four direction buttons (N,S,E,W) which border the map display. The map display then scrolls in the desired direction until the button is released. The illusion is of a smooth one-piece map covering the entire transit region. In reality, individual map areas are pieced together on the fly, with new map sections being delivered by the web server as required. Please note that due to this network activity, some delay may be experienced during navigation.
To alter the map display by a small amount, the map dragging feature is preferable to the direction buttons. To drag the map, simply hold down the mouse anywhere over the map not associated with a bus (or street name) and move the mouse; the map area shifts in real-time! Upon release, the map is updated with relevant bus locations.
The third and final map navigation tool involves jumping to a completely new map area accessed via a set of named map locations. This is detailed further in the maps menu section below.

There are three options under the Window menu: New, Close, and Exit. The "New" option allows a new window to be opened. The map area displayed in the new window is the same as that in the current window. The result is thus a "open new copy" functionality. The map areas in each window can then be navigated independently.
The "Close" option closes the current window. The "Exit" option closes all open windows, thus shutting Busview down completely. Keyboard shortcuts are associated with each of these options, as shown in the image above.

The Maps menu is split into two sections. At the top, there are three options for selection and bookmark management of locations (maps). Below these, the list of currently bookmarked locations is displayed. Selection of any location from this bookmark list will display that location at the center of the associated map display; the previous location is lost (a history of visited locations is not supported). The first time Busview is loaded, a set of pre-assigned bookmarks is presented, with the head bookmark being the main campus of the University of Washington. As personalized bookmarks are compiled (see next section), the pre-assigned ones are gradually lost (a maximum of 16 are maintained). The initial map area displayed when Busview starts up is always derived from the head bookmark, so in the case of a new Busview user with the default bookmark set, the map display is centered on the UW campus, as shown in the Initial View above.
The first Maps menu option is "Select PreNamed Location". This is intended as a map navigational aid. Selection of this option reveals a further popup window, the Map Selection window. By choosing a map category from the left hand list, e.g. ParkandRides, the corresponding set of named locations for that category appears in the right hand list. A named location can now be selected from this list. Upon confirmation (via the "OK" button), the Map Selection window will close and the main window will display the chosen location. There are approximately 1200 pre-named locations available; note that these are fixed and not editable by the user. Below is an image of the Map Selection window.

The second Maps menu option is "Bookmark Current Location". The purpose of this option is to enable the user to attach a personalized name, e.g. 'My House', to the current map area being displayed. Upon selection, the Location Requester window appears, as shown below. As locations are named, they are added to the user's list of bookmarked locations. By default, new named locations are appended to the end of the bookmark list. By checking the "Make Default Location" box in the Location Requester window, the newly named location will appear at the head of the bookmarks list. This has some significance, since the location which heads the bookmark list (the "default" location) is that which is centered on a map display area when Busview is next started on your browser.
Note that even a location arrived at by selection of a pre-named location (see above) can be personalized. For example, after selecting pre-named location "Education|UW Main Campus", the user can personalize this location to "Where I Go To School". An example Location Requester window is shown below.

The third and final Maps menu option is "Edit Bookmarked Locations". Upon selection, the Bookmarked Locations edit window pops up. Options are provided to make any bookmark the default, thus promoting it to the head of the bookmark list. As explained above, the default location is significant, since it is the location which shows when Busview is next started. Other options in the Bookmarked Locations edit window are those to rename a bookmark, to delete a bookmark, and finally to close the edit window. An example Bookmarked Locations edit window is shown below.

Busview Bookmarks and Cookies
The saving of bookmarked location information is achieved via the use of cookies. For the bookmarking feature to work correctly, your browser must be set up to accept cookies from the Busview web site. Without this support, the pre-assigned map list, headed by the UW main campus, will always appear as your bookmarks.
A cookie is really just a string. The Busview web server creates a cookie out of the information in your bookmarked location list. It then sends the cookie to your web browser, which stores it on your hard disk. Whenever you load Busview, the browser sends the cookie to the Busview web server, which it uses to configure the Busview applet so that your personalized bookmark list appears in the Maps menu.

Currently, only one option is available under this menu. This option toggles the vehicle identification number (VIN) on and off for the bus location icon. The VIN is a number that is painted on the back and top of each bus. As other options are available, they will be listed under this pull-down menu.

The image on the left shows the bus location icon with the VIN on, and the second image shows it with the VIN off. The default for the main maps is for the VIN to be off. When the bus progress bar is being viewed, the VIN is always on. This allows you to track the correct bus along an entire route.

Choosing "Busview Help" will link your browser to this web page. Choosing "About Busview" will display the Busview version number and the list of well deserving authors!

These icons represent the buses and appear on all bus display types: map displays, bus progress displays, and route segment displays. The top number (in bold type) is the route number of the bus. The bottom number is a time stamp showing the last time that the bus was heard from. This time stamp should be compared with the "latest data arrival" time display in the upper right corner of the applet window to check the timeliness of the bus data for each bus. A popup menu is available for every bus, by clicking the mouse over the bus icon. The features offered by this menu are explained below.
For map displays, the black "arrow" on the second image shows the direction the bus is traveling along its route. If no arrow is showing, the bus has not yet moved since data for it was first received. Once subsequent updates are received, an arrow will appear to indicate its direction (N,S,E,W only). For the progress type bus displays, all travel along the linear "roadway" is from left to right and thus no direction indicator is required.

At times, some bus icons may be partially hidden due to the number of buses showing on the screen. Clicking on a bus location icon will bring up additional options. The last two options, "To Front" and "To Back," allow the user to choose which icon to view. In the images above, clicking on "To Front" will bring the selected bus icon to the top of the stack, and choosing "To Back" will send it to the bottom of the stack.

Another bus icon popup menu option is "Route Schedule," as shown above. Selecting this option will link your browser to the Metro bus schedule for that bus route.

After clicking on a bus location icon, the "Bus Progress" option allows you to see a visual, linear representation of that particular coach's progress. That coach, and any other coaches traveling along the same route, will be represented as icons on the blue "roadway." Buses travel from left to right along the roadway. (To limit the length of the roadway and obtain a more specific progress bar, see route selection.) The blue arrows and labels represent time points, geographical locations used by Metro for bus scheduling purposes. The timepoint names at the start and end of the route are given. Other timepoints are shown as blue arrows only; when the cursor is positioned over such as arrow, the timepoint's name will pop up for viewing. The bus icons work the same as on the main display, i.e. there is a popup menu with a variety of further options.

An alarm can be set along any progress bar by clicking on the blue "roadway." Since the buses move from left to right, the alarm must be set to the right of a bus to be effective. Only one alarm may be set on each progress bar. However, multiple alarms may be set along a route by using the Window|New option to clone as many copies of the progress bar as you would like. After clicking on the roadway, an alarm clock will show on the screen, along with information about where it has been set, as seen in the image above. To set the alarm in a new location, click elsewhere along the roadway. The original alarm will disappear and another will appear in the new location. To remove an alarm, simply click on the clock image, and it will disappear.
Once the bus has reached the alarm setting, a notification window will appear (see below). The alarm also emits an audible reminder when the bus passes. The "Alarm Setting" in the progress window will then be set to "off." The alarm will not go off again if another bus on the progress bar reaches the alarm location. Manually setting the alarm status to "on" will re-prime the alarm to produce more notifications.

The time display in the upper right of all windows shows when data were last received by the Busview applet. Data packets arrive approximately every second. Packets do not contain information on every bus, however, as new data are available for each bus approximately every minute rather than every second. The greater the disparity between the bus icon time and the last data arrival time, the more out of date or less believable is the current bus icon position.
The icon shows the last known position of a bus, and until the bus sends more data, the image will be stationary. As a result, the buses appear to "hop" across the screen. Busview presently shows only current data and makes no attempt to predict bus locations.

You can select which bus routes to view by entering one or more bus route numbers, separated either by commas or spaces, in the "Buses To Display On Map" box and then checking the "Apply" box. This will filter out other bus routes, allowing you to monitor only routes of immediate interest. In the image above, two routes, 15 and 43, have been entered in the edit box, resulting in only route 15 and 43 buses being displayed on the map. Note that this may produce a blank screen if no buses are running on the selected route(s). Once buses from the selected route(s) enter the map area, however, they will be visible. To turn off this filtering option and return to a display of all buses, simply uncheck the "Apply" box. The list of selected routes can be edited at any time, irrespective of the "Apply" check state.

You may select a specific route to monitor (rather than a specific bus) by typing a route number into the "Route Progress" edit box, as shown above, and then hitting the return key. A dialogue box (see below) will pop up.

This option allows you to (1) specify portions of a route for viewing and (2) to capture all buses that will be running between two desired locations. The locations available for selection are known as timepoints, geographic locations used for scheduling buses. Be sure to check the "Desired Direction of Travel" before making selections.
The intersections listed are not all the stops along a route but rather time points on that route. To correctly select an origin intersection, choose the one that is closest to but also BEFORE (nearer the route origin) your desired bus stop where you want to catch the bus. The opposite is necessary for the destination timepoint; choose the one that is closest to but also AFTER (nearer the route end) your desired final destination bus stop. This ensures that all buses on that route that will allow you to reach your destination will show on the "roadway."
Once two intersections have been selected, hitting the "Show Route" button will bring up a progress bar (see bus progress for more details). If a route contains sub-routes (i.e. a local and an express), multiple progress bar windows will appear as each bus will be traveling on different roads, past different timepoints. Note that since a route rather than a bus is being monitored, the roadway may show no bus icons when it first appears. As buses move into the selected area, they will become visible on the screen. The image below shows origin and destination bus stops, inside the boundaries of the chosen timepoint locations. Like with the bus progress displays, this "route segment" display features alarm notification.

Intersections on the map have black "hot spots." When the cursor passes over them, a street name will pop up, as seen in the above image. To add greater definition to the maps, freeways are blue, primary roads are red, and secondary roads are white. (see below)

[Blue Line]

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(July 8, 2002)