uta bus routes

UPDATE: this project kindof died when uta bus routes appeared on google maps, and also when i spent the summer *not* in utah and *not* riding UTA busses.

public transportation where i live kinda sucks. there seems to be a general attitude of not caring about it around here. mostly because the majority of people have cars. i don't, however, and the lack of information around here frustrates me.

when i got a job that's about 10 miles away from where i live, i needed to find out what bus can get me there the fastest. of course, not knowing the geography of utah too well it would be nice to have something convenient on google maps or something..but of course there's nothing (yet). the utah transit authority, the people who run the buses, have a website with a horrible little route search and some hard-to-read maps, which aren't very helpful at all.

so in the past couple months i've been using the buses i know work, and when i have time i experiment. today i found a bus that brings me about 3 blocks from home in about 20 minutes, while the bus i had normally been taking takes much longer. wish i had known that before, eh? i almost missed the stop it got me there so fast compared to the other line.

so i decided to work on a little project in my spare time, google-izing all the poorly-organized information there is out there. even if something like this has already been done somewhere on the web (i have found a couple of places where it has been, but not very well), it will be a good excercise in web development, programming, and the google maps programming api, which is always interesting and good!

you'll be able to find updates on this here: http://john.cheslicious.com/utaroutes.

if you ride uta buses, trax, frontrunner, or anything else (that isn't a car) and want to help me, contact me and i'll let you know when i can use your help (when i actually start the project...right now it's just in the idea/planning stage)

yay for knowing how to program, eh? :)