TheBus is HEA

By now, you may have heard about a new service from TheBus, Honolulu’s award-winning public transit system.  It’s called TheBus-HEA, or Honolulu Estimated Arrival.  If you haven’t already heard about it, KGMB9 and The Honolulu Advertiser had excellent pieces on this new service.  Basically, it taps into the GPS on every bus and relays that information to tell you when the next bus will be arriving at a particular stop.

But I don’t want to focus on telling you about the service.  What I want to do is tell you about how easy it is to use the system.  It’s optimized to display well and load fairly quickly on a mobile device, not just my iPhone 3GS.

You should read the FAQ section to get a better idea on how to use the system, but here’s the most important part:

Estimated and scheduled arrival times

What does “Arriving”, “Departing”, and “Departed” mean?

Arriving:

The bus will arrive in 1 or 2 minutes

Departing:

The bus is at the stop, or the bus should be in sight; if you are not already at the stop, then you will likely miss this bus.

Departed:

The bus left 1 or 2 minutes ago

Some routes have vehicle numbers and others don’t.

If HEA shows a bus number, it found the bus scheduled to be on the route. It also knows how early or late it is to estimate when the bus will arrive. If HEA can’t find the bus, for whatever reason, it shows when the bus is scheduled to arrive.

The whole process is straightforward, quick, and easy.  In fact, if you look at the timestamp in my photos, it took more time to wait for the traffic signal to change to allow me to walk than it did for me to look up the information.

Step 1:  Go to http://hea.thebus.org on your mobile device (preferably an iPhone)

Step 2:  Type in the location of your bus stop

You can use cross streets (as I did, using King and Cooke) or you can even type in a well-known location (like “Ala Moana Center”).

Step 3:  Select your correct stop from the list

If you know the exact stop number, this is really easy.  But even if you don’t, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds to find your stop.

Step 4:  View all buses arriving at that stop by Route Number and Description

All you need to do is scroll down to the bus you want to catch, departing at a time you want to catch it.

Step 5:  Click on the route number to see future arrival times of buses on that route

This is especially helpful if it’s apparent that your bus will arrive at the bus stop before you do.  Or, if you need to run a small errand before catching a bus, you can estimate how long you have.

That’s it! Just get on your bus and go off to your destination.

Mahalo!

***

P.S. – You can follow me on Twitter (@exbor) to get more regular updates.  Be warned, they are much more “regular” than my posts here.

P.P.S. – Did you know capsun.org has it’s own Twitter account (@capsundotorg) that Tweets whenever I blog here or on my photo blog?

Tagged as: Capsun, exbor, Hawaii, hea, honolulu, thebus