Real-time bus schedules takes the uncertainty out of riding the bus. Sometimes a bus arrives early and you have to choose whether to chase after it or wait for the next one. Other times the bus arrives late and you have to wait at the bus stop, looking down the road wondering when the bus will appear. If the weather is bad or you’re alone at the bus stop in the dark, you need to know exactly when your bus is coming at the very least for peace of mind.

Bing Maps real-time transit coverage brings real-time bus schedules to Bing Maps for the Puget Sound / Seattle area and beyond. When you first open the Bing Maps app, you’re shown thearea map closest to where you are now. I recommend using the Bing Maps Directions and enter your start and end point for your trip and choose the "Bus" icon to get it to calculate a transit route. I did Redmond to Seattle

Once you’ve gotten the initial route and know where you need to pick up your bus, you can click on click on "Leave at" or "Arrive by" to get some options that will align with when you either want to leave or need to get there in time for an appointment. Please note that not only can you see real-time schedules, you also can get directions to the bus stop, save the stop to quickly bring it up in the future, and dive into StreetSide to make sure you know where the bus stop is all of which are benefits Bing offers over other sources of real time transit information.

If you want to add this functionality into your own application, why not try our Directions plug-in in our Interactive SDK?  Check out Create transit route (bing.com) and go to Microsoft.com/maps to find out more about or Bing Maps Maps for Enterprise Developer APIs and SDKs.