Don’t you just love it when someone takes a bunch of useful internet tools and turns them into something even cooler and more useful than each of the parts? In yet another thrilling use of the Google Maps ^[1] API, Chris Smoak has created an amazing visualization project for the Seattle bus system. Add busmonster.com ^[2] to your bookmarks and be astounded by it’s niftiness.

In addition to the already mentioned Google Maps, the project incorporates some of the most useful parts of the King County Metro ^[3] site, which is a nice resource for keeping up-to-date about the latest in transit developments, schedules, route maps, and the very cool point-to-point trip planner [# ^[4]]. BusMonster also uses some of the cool work from the University of Washington’s Intelligent Transportation Systems research group [# ^[5]], which built tools to allow you to know when a bus is about to show up at your stop (mybus ^[6]) or to watch the busses from your computer screen (busview ^[7]).

In any case, if you’re someone that uses the bus to get around town or just like looking at really well-designed information tools you’re bound to find BusMonster to be a fantastic resource.

(via evan [lj ^[8]])