never go home

I got my first brief taste of being on campus as a student yesterday. Angela (SILS ‘06) gave me a personal tour and showed me where all of the necessities of grad student’s life are on campus at UNC. Surprisingly, everything I need is within a relatively small area– food (including local Middle Eastern & Indian food), books (store & four different libraries), and classrooms. I will try out my sense of direction on campus again tomorrow for the grad school orientation.

I have mostly everything worked out for me except for the bus system. When I left campus, I got on a bus and ended up only halfway home when the bus came to the end of its route. Someday, when I have the full knowledge of my IS degree behind me, I would like to sort out the Chapel Hill bus system’s resources. As far as I can tell, there are at least three different sources of information including:

• the Town’s site with basic schedules and maps
• a general triangle area bus planner site where you can put in two addresses and it routes you along the fastest route
• NextBus where you can track the locations of all the buses in real time.

However, all of these potentially useful tools are on totally different web pages. There must be a way to display all of this data on a single page with a clickable map that is linked to real time bus information and future schedules. The other issues with the bus is that most of the bus stops have very little information about what bus will arrive when. They have all of this real-time bus data but there is only one bus stop that displays when buses are arriving. They should at least have a phone based bus info system where you text message a bus stop number and a bus name and get the next arrival or something…perhaps this is a project for the future?