The Animated Buses of San Francisco

Somewhere in the multiverse there is one lonely universe where all of San Francisco's buses run on time.

Luckily we now have a little window into this perfect world thanks to Danny Whalen's SFMTA Weekday Stop Times map. Danny's map animates the moving routes all of San Francisco's buses over 24 hours in just 60 seconds.

If you want to compare the ideal San Francisco transit universe to our non-ideal universe then you need to have a look at the San Francisco Muni Tracker.


The San Francisco Muni Tracker is a real-time map of all the buses in San Francisco’s Muni transit system. The map includes two main views. The 'Now' layer allows you to view all the Muni buses moving in real-time on a map of San Francisco. Click on any one of the buses' map markers and you can view how many miles the bus has covered in the last 24 hours.

Switch to the 'Replay the last 24 hours' layer and you can view an animation of all the buses' tracks over the last 24 hours. This is a great visualization of how the buses move around San Francisco. It highlights the reduction in bus activity at night and also the higher speeds when buses are on the freeways.

The map itself was created with Firebase's realtime transit data and CartoDB’s Torque library. You can read more about the map on the Firebase blog - Build Realtime Firebase Maps with CartoDB.