Tag: Trains

Dashing Arrivals: Watch Every Bus, Train, and Ferry in Puget Sound Move in Real Time

There’s a particular kind of magic in watching a whole city move at once. Not one bus, not one train — all of them, gliding across the map in real time, each one a little rectangle of somebody’s commute home.

That’s Dashing Arrivals — a live transit map for the Puget Sound region. Open it up and you’re looking at every active bus, train, and ferry in service right now, from a King County Metro coach on Rainier Avenue to a Sound Transit Link train sliding through the Rainier Valley to a Washington State Ferry crossing to Bainbridge. On a typical weekday afternoon that’s over 1,100 vehicles on screen, all updating live.

This post is a tour of what it is and what you can do with it.

The whole region at a glance

An overview of the city in transit.

The default view drops you over Puget Sound with everything turned on. A quick legend does a lot of work here: color tells you the agency and shape tells you the type (bus, train, or ferry), and every icon is rotated to face the direction it’s actually traveling. Green is King County Metro, blue/indigo is Sound Transit, red is Pierce Transit, purple is Kitsap, and so on — seven agencies in all, plus the ferries.

Pan, zoom, and the icons resize smoothly so trains read a little larger than buses, which read a little larger than ferries. Between updates, vehicles don’t teleport — they animate from their last position to the next one, so the whole map has a calm, continuous, living quality instead of a jumpy refresh.

Click any vehicle for the details

Showing Route 1 Line

Tap a vehicle and it tells you who it is: the route, the agency, the fleet number, its heading (as a compass direction and degrees), its speed, and when it last reported in. Here’s a 1 Line Link train in the Rainier Valley, heading south at 159°.

See that Show route ▸ link at the top of the popup? That’s where it gets fun.

See the entire route

Click Show route and the map draws the vehicle’s full line — the shape it follows and every stop along the way — right under the live vehicles still moving on it.

Link light rail line 1 in the south city.

Here’s the 1 Line, Link light rail’s spine, threading from the north down through downtown, Beacon Hill, and the Rainier Valley. The blue train icons strung along the highlighted line are the actual trains in service on it right now.

Link Light Rail 2 Line

And the newer 2 Line, running across Lake Washington on I‑90 to Bellevue and up to Downtown Redmond. (Fun bit of local history: the 2 Line effectively replaced the old ST Express 550 bus between Seattle and Bellevue — which is why you won’t find a 550 on the map anymore.)

Rail beyond Link: the Sounder

Light rail isn’t the only train out there. Pick a Sounder commuter-rail train and you get the full BNSF corridor.

South Sounder Commuter Rail Line.

This is the S Line, running from King Street Station in Seattle south through Tukwila, Kent, Auburn, and on toward Tacoma and Lakewood. Sounder only runs during peak commute windows, so catching one on the map is a small, satisfying reward for looking at the right time — and down in Tacoma you can see Pierce Transit’s red buses fill in the local network.

Buses, of course — every route

The same trick works for any bus. Click one, hit Show route, and the corridor lights up in that agency’s color.

C Line Rapid Ride.

The RapidRide C Line from West Seattle into downtown, in Metro green.

E Line Rapid Ride.

And the RapidRide E Line, a ruler-straight shot down Aurora Avenue from Shoreline to downtown — one of the busiest bus corridors in the state. Whether it’s a lettered RapidRide line, a numbered local route, or a Community Transit Swift line, the route overlay works the same way.

Filter the firehose

Eleven-hundred vehicles is a lot. The Show and Agencies panel lets you dial it in — toggle whole modes or individual agencies on and off.

Filtering with busses off and only showing the trains and ferries.

Here I’ve switched off buses to leave just trains and ferries. Suddenly the shape of the rail network jumps out — the Link lines tracing north–south and across the lake — alongside the ferries stitching the Sound together to Bainbridge, Bremerton, Kingston, and Vashon. It’s the whole regional rail-and-water map, drawn entirely by the vehicles themselves.

When’s my ride? Live arrivals at any stop

Zoom in and the stops appear. Click one to get a live arrivals board.

Stop arrivals.

This is the Symphony stop downtown, with real-time predictions counting down — Due, Due, 1 min, 4 min, 6 min… — for 1 Line and 2 Line trains toward Lynnwood City Center. Each prediction carries a live indicator, and any alerts that affect this specific stop are pinned right at the top.

Know before you go: service alerts

Service alerts!

The pill at the top of the screen keeps a running count of active service alerts across the region — detours, stop relocations, reduced service, construction. Open it and you can read them all: each card shows the agency, the affected routes, the reroute instructions, and a link out to the agency’s own detail page. It’s the regional “what’s disrupted right now” board in one place.

Light or dark, your call

Prefer a bright map? A theme toggle switches between a sleek dark basemap and a clean light one (with a System option that follows your OS). Same live data, different mood.

Under the hood

For the curious, Dashing Arrivals is a modern, open-source web app:

  • Live data comes from the OneBusAway Puget Sound regional API, decoded from GTFS‑realtime vehicle-position feeds. A single regional feed covers King County Metro, Sound Transit, Community Transit, Pierce Transit, Kitsap Transit, and Everett Transit.
  • Ferries come from a separate source — the WSDOT Washington State Ferries vessel-location API — and are normalized in alongside everything else.
  • The map is MapLibre GL on an open OpenFreeMap basemap (no proprietary map key required), with the app built on Next.js and React and deployed on Vercel.
  • Vehicle positions are fetched on a short polling loop and cached server-side, then eased between updates on the client so motion looks smooth. Icons are tinted per agency, sized by zoom, and rotated to the reported heading.

Eventually the GTFS feed is going to have some changes, and I plan to put those fixes in then, but in the meantime this is a solid way to explore the Seattle and Puget Sound area’s transit options!

Go watch the city move

That’s the whole pitch: one map, every vehicle, in real time, with routes, stops, arrivals, and alerts a click away. It’s genuinely useful for catching a bus — and, if you’re the type who likes watching systems work, it’s a little bit hypnotic.

Try it for yourself at dashingarrivals.com.

Screenshots captured live from dashingarrivals.com. Basemap © OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles, data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Real-time transit data via OneBusAway and WSDOT.

Strata, Ninjas, Distributed Data Day, and Graph Day Trip Recap

This last week was a helluva set of trips, conferences to attend, topics to discuss, and projects to move forward on. This post I’ll attempt to run through the gamut of events and the graph of things that are transversing from the conference nodes onward! (See what I did there, yeah, transpiling that graph verbiage onto events and related efforts!)

Monday Flight(s)

Monday involved some flying around the country for me via United. It was supposed to be a singular flight, but hey, why not some adventures around the country for shits and giggles right! Two TIL’s (Things I Learned) that I might have known already, but repetition reinforces one’s memory.

  1. If you think you’ve bought a nonstop ticket be sure to verify that there isn’t a stopover half way through the trip. If there’s any delays or related changes your plane might be taken away, you’ll get shuffled off to who know’s what other flight, and then you end up spending the whole day flying around instead of the 6 hour flight you’re supposed to have.
  2. Twitter sentiment tends to be right, it’s good policy to avoid United, they schedule their planes and the logistical positions and crews in ways that generally become problematic quickly when there’s a mere minor delay or two.

Tuesday Strata Day Zero (Train & Workshop Day)

Tuesday rolled in and Strata kicked off with a host of activities. I rolled in to scope out our booth but overall, Tuesday was a low yield activity day. Eventually met up with the team and we rolled out for an impromptu team dinner, drinks, and further discussions. We headed off to Ninja, which if you haven’t been there it’s a worthy adventure for those brave enough. I had enough fun that I felt I should relay this info and provide a link or three so you too could go check it out.

Wednesday Strata Day One

Day two of Strata kicked off and my day involved mostly discussions with speakers, meetings, a few analyst discussions, and going around to booths to check out which technology I needed to add to my “check it out soon” list. Here are a few of the things I noted and are now on the list.

I also worked with the video team and cut some video introductions for Strata and upcoming DataStax Developer Days Announcements. DataStax Developer Days are free events coming to a range of cities. Check them out here and sign up for whichever you’re up for attending. I’m looking forward to teaching those sessions and learning from attendees about their use cases and domains in which they’re working.

The cities you’ll find us coming to soon:

I wish I could come and teach in every city but I narrowed it down to Chicago and Dallas, so if you’re in those cities, I look forward to meeting you there! Otherwise you’ll get to meet other excellent members of the team!

This evening we went to Death Ave. The food was great, drinks solid, and the name was simply straight up metal. Albeit it be a rather upper crust dining experience and no brutal metal was in sight to be seen or heard. However, I’d definitely recommend the joint, especially for groups as they have a whole room you can get if you’ve got enough people and that improves the experience over standard dining.

Thursday Strata Day Two

I scheduled my flights oddly for this day. Which in turn left me without any time to spend at Strata. But that’s the issues one runs into when things are booked back to back on opposite coasts of the country! Thus, this day involved me returning to Newark via Penn Station and flying back out to San Francisco. As some of you may know, I’m a bit of a train geek, so I took a New Jersey NEC (Northeast Corridor) train headed for Trenton out of Penn back to the airport.

The train, whether you’re taking the Acela, Metroliner, NJ Transit, or whatever is rolling along to Newark that day is the way to go in my opinion. I’ve taken the bus, which is slightly cheaper, but meh it’s an icky east coast intercity bus. The difference in price in a buck or three or something, nothing significant, and of course you can jump in an Uber, Taxi, or other transport also. Even when they can make it faster I tend to prefer the train. It’s just more comfortable, I don’t have to deal with a driver, and they’re more reliable. The turnpikes and roadways into NYC from Newark aren’t always 100%, and during rush hour don’t even expect to get to the city in a timely manner. But to each their own, but for those that might not know, beware the taxi price range of $55 base plus tolls which often will put your trip into Manhattan into the $99 or above price range. If you’re going to any other boroughs you better go ahead and take a loan out of the bank.

The trip from Newark to San Francisco was aboard United on a Boeing 757. I kid you not, regardless of airline, if you get to fly on a 757 versus a 737 or Airbus 319 or 320, it’s preferable. Especially for flights in the 2+ hour range. There is just a bit more space, the engines make less noise, the overall plane flies smoother, and the list of comforts is just a smidgen better all around. The 757 is the way to go for cross continent flights!

In San Francisco I took the standard BART route straight into the city and over to the airbnb I was staying at in Protrero Hill. Right by Farley’s on Texas Street if you know the area. I often pick the area because it’s cheap (relatively), super chill, good food nearby, not really noisy, and super close to where the Distributed Data Summit and Graph Day Conferences Venue is located.

The rest of Thursday included some pizza and a short bout of hacking some Go. Then a moderately early turn in around midnight to get rested for the next day.

Friday Distributed Data Summit

I took the short stroll down Texas Street. While walking I watched a few Caltrain Commuter Trains roll by heading into downtown San Francisco. Eventually I got to 16th and cross the rail line and found the walkway through campus to the conference venue. Walked toward the building entrance and there was my fellow DataStaxian Amanda. We chatted a bit and then I headed over to check out the schedule and our DataStax Booth.

We had a plethora of our rather interesting and fun new DataStax tshirts. I’ll be picking some up week after next during our DevRel week get together. I’ll be hauling these back up to Seattle and could prospectively get some sent out to others in the US if you’re interested. Here’s a few pictures of the tshirts.

After that joined the audience for Nate McCall’s Keynote. It was good, he put together a good parallel of life and finding and starting to work with and on Cassandra. Good kick off, and after I delved into a few other talks. Overall, all were solid, and some will even have videos posted on the DataStax Academy Youtube Account. Follow me @Adron or the @DataStaxAcademy account to get the tweets when they’re live, or alternatively just subscribe to the YouTube Channel (honestly, that’s probably the easiest way)!

After the conference wrapped up we rolled through some pretty standard awesome hanging out DevRel DataStax style. It involved the following ordered events:

  1. Happy hour at Hawthorne in San Francisco with drink tickets, some tasty light snacks, and most excellent conversation about anything and everything on the horizon for Cassandra and also a fair bit of chatter about what we’re lining up for upcoming DataStax releases!
  2. BEER over yonder at the world famous Mikeller Bar. This place is always pretty kick ass. Rock n’ Roll, seriously stout beer, more good convo and plotting to take over the universe, and an all around good time.
  3. Chinese Food in CHINA TOWN! So good! Some chow mein, curry, and a host of things. I’m a big fan of always taking a walk into Chinatown in San Francicsco and getting some eats. It’s worth it!

Alright, after that, unlike everybody else that then walked a mere two blocks to their hotel or had taken a Lyft back, I took a solid walk all the way down to the Embarcadero. Walked along for a bit until I decided I’d walked enough and boarded a T-third line train out to Dogpatch. Then walked that last 6 or so blocks up the hill to Texas Street. Twas an excellent night and a great time with everybody!

Saturday Graph Day

Do you do graph stuff? Lately I’ve started looking into Graph Database tech again since I’ll be working on and putting together some reference material and code around the DataStax Graph Database that has been built onto the Cassandra distro. I’m still, honestly kind of a newb at a lot of this but getting it figured out quickly. I do after all have a ton of things I’d like to put into and be able to query against from a graph database perspective. Lot’s of graph problems of course don’t directly correlate to a graph database being a solution, but it’s indeed part of the solution!

Overall, it was an easy day, the video team got a few more talks and I attended several myself. Again, same thing as previously mentioned subscribe to the channel on Youtube or follow me on Twitter @Adron or the crew @DataStaxAcademy to get notified when the videos are released.

Summary

It has been a whirlwind week! Exhausting but worth it. New connections made, my own network of contacts and graph of understanding on many topics has expanded. I even got a short little time in New York among all the activity to do some studying, something I always love to break away and do. I do say though, I’m looking forward to getting back to the coding, Twitch streams, and the day to day in Seattle again. Got some solid material coming together and looking forward to blogging that too, and it only gets put together when I’m on the ground at home in Seattle.

Cheers, happy thrashing code!

Last Week’s Travels, On Monday @ 2am

The last week has been a lot of fun travels, great meetups, and solid meetings. All focused around several key topics;

  • traveling to nearby cities to speak & present on immutable infrastructure with Terraform and Kubernetes and…
  • meetings to help build next generation applications for medical, personal, and privacy tracking information.

Before rolling into this week I wanted to put together a quick recap of events and meetings.

The travel consisted of an easy trip to Olympia. I always love traveling to Olympia, and in normal Adron fashion I do it my way, which consists of no cars but a lot of other fun stuff. Olympia, you see, isn’t exactly on the beaten path anymore except for auto-travel, and even then it’s off down a dead end Interstate cut off. But I’m sure that this is part of the beauty of this small city. It helps keep it free of arbitrary “pass through” traffic of people who’d not care or just toss their trash randomly about the city.

One can study this phenom with cities in the US which have an Interstate cut through them, with exits, and an Interstate that goes around the city. Massively different results, the later letting a city retain cleanliness and it’s own much better then the aforementioned technique.

Olympia, I might add is one of the few small cities that really retains a lot of the zeal and attractiveness of the gritty northwest vibe of yesteryear. Oly, as it’s oft referred has tons of unique, local, individualistic shops and street culture. One might be amazed to see such a thing in such a small city, but Oly is one of those few places that bats above its weight. It’s definitely worth visiting.

Each visit to Olympia that I’ve taken I stay at a few different places.

  • Sometimes at my buddy Bobby’s house.
  • Sometimes at an airbnb.
  • Regularly at the Governor in downtown.

The Governor in downtown is this classic 50’s era hotel. It faces the old Capital across the park, just near where the new capital is, but the benefit is its even closer to downtown Olympia. Here I’ve scratched a circle around it, where I go to speak just north of the hotel at the South Sound Developers User Group, and then we always retire to the east at Fish Tale Brewing.


The trip to Olympia I enjoy immensely. It all starts with the standard Amtrak Cascades departure from Seattle at King Street Station. The departure was on time, as was the arrival, which is something that is pretty standard on our northwestern Cascades train routes. I don’t always expect them to be, being US trains, but these are pretty reliable here.

After the scenic and relaxing coding session on the train, I arrive at the station in Olympia. This station is a cute little deal, located in the suburbs on the freight line about ~8 miles or so east of downtown Oly. You see, in typical American fashion the state, federal regs, and railroad(s), along with a failure of foresight by previous generations decided they’d tear up the track connection to the station that did exist in Olympia. This station, of course, was built around people traveling from Oly to other places, and was built intelligently, as we tended to do in long lost past decades. But hey, I arrived at the new station and as I generally do, I had a plan already sorted.

I’ve put together a few photos and a video short for the trip too, enjoy.

My path along the Chehalis Trail into Olympia

Looking at the *Old* Tracks in Olympia along Colorful Leaves

There’s a spectacular trail that is very close to the station that I take built upon an old rail line that was abandoned. Here’s a map with the trail highlighted along with the northern and southern connecting routes. At the southern end I’ve circled the Amtrak Lacey Station (Lacey, being where it is actually located, I always call it Olympia though because that’s the distinctively larger city!)


I might muster some time to post the other images and video from the trip later. But for now, this is it. In other news, I’ve got my “Secret Business Brunch n’ Bike” brunch lunch scheduled tomorrow at Hi-Life @ 11, and also beers on Wednesday. Feel free to join me, always hacking, biking, and eating something. Cheers!