helsinkiThe HKL Helsinki’s Pub­lic Transit has a mov­ing, real time map of bus loc­a­tions avail­able via their web­site. Now that’s what the pub­lic wants to know. Where is my bus? Why its right there. That’s what real time GPS report­ing is for. I love this. You can even click on the bus icon/number and choose to dis­play its routes, the stops it makes and make the con­nec­tion you need. You can even choose to ‘fol­low’ the bus and have the map scroll with its pro­gress. It is most fun if you do this in satel­lite or hybrid view (note: the buses don’t run 24 hours, so if there are no buses on the map, they aren’t on the streets either, so check back later). Wouldn’t that be abso­lutely use­ful on a brand new iPhone …oops its Fin­land and I sup­pose that should be Nokia N95 ;-) (no com­ment on the fact that all the main­stream blogs felt com­pelled to echo each other when 29 June was announced as that release date — just barely avoid­ing going down that rant).

I wish the HSR Hamilton’s transit author­ity provided the same. There may well be other transit author­it­ies now provid­ing this real-time info, but this is the first one I have seen in action. Awe­some! Yay Finland.

On a per­sonal note, I find myself sit­ting star­ing at a chosen bus, watch­ing it speed up slow down, stop and take on pas­sen­gers. A dec­ade ago I used to occa­sion­ally tune into one of the many traffic/weather cams that the Finns had on line. I par­tic­u­larly liked watch­ing the bor­der cross­ing to Rus­sia. It was a vir­tual vaca­tion, if only for a few minutes. This bus thing is strangely similar…the strange aspect being me and my fix­a­tion with this I am sure. Is this a form of escap­ism? The sys­tem also lets you do simple route plan­ning by input­ing start points and end points. I had to chuckle over the request to “write the address you seek,” its sounds so mys­tical and you know, this is some cool magic!

Updated: Just saw that the Google Blog just had an art­icle on their inter­ac­tion with transit sys­tems. No link to Hel­sinki, nor to real time report­ing that I can tell, but some addi­tional dis­cus­sion.