TriMet Transit Tracker Widget:
Portland is blessed with a very good public transportation system called TriMet. My school, Lewis Elementary is served by the #75 bus. There is a stop right at the end of our parking lot. Several of our students, parents and staff take the bus to and from school and we have found the Tri-Met Transit Tracker to be a great tool, especially when it is raining and one would like to avoid standing in the rain as long as possible.
The Transit Tracker uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to track how far a bus is from a particular stop. Every TriMet bus is equipped with a transmitter that allows continuous satellite tracking with an accuracy of about 30 feet. This information can easily be pulled up from their web site, (or sent to a cell phone) and as a matter of fact it is bookmarked on the image we use on our iMacs.
I recently discovered a Dashboard Widget that will display arrival information for a particular stop. In an earlier post, I discussed how we use an LCD, powered by a Mac, as a reader board in our main hallway, and a program called TickerShock to display a school events RSS feed along the screen bottom. We plan to add the Transit Ticker Widget (We'll run two copies of the widget, one for northbound, one for southbound...) to the display so that the bus arrival information will also be displayed for students, parents and staff.
Technorati Tags: public transit, Lewis Elementary, widgets