Shelter Update - Avalon Mall
We have received a number of questions about the new shelter at the Avalon Mall. Mall administration has installed benches in the existing shelter and have also ordered two new shelters that will be installed early in 2005 - one additional shelter for the top parking lot, and one new shelter for the bus stop on the lower lot.

Heated shelters?  What will we think of next?
Plans are in place to test the possibility of providing heat to bus shelters ensuring that customers stay warm while waiting for the bus.  While the technology isn't new, providing heat in a stand-alone bus shelter is ground-breaking for public transit in Canada.

"We've picked a location and will install the heating system over the coming weeks", says Mark Chancey, Manager of Marketing & Information Services.  "We've been working hard over the past few years to make riding with us a more enjoyable experience.  Keeping our customers warm on those miserably cold winter days will go a long way in making our customers more comfortable while waiting at the bus stop."

Customers won't know, by looking at the shelter, that a heating system is in operation.  The actual system will be embedded within the concrete floor of the shelter, similar to the in-floor heating system you would install in a house; the heat radiates from the floor upwards, heating the air in the shelter as required.

Graduating in style with a 40-foot limo
If you're graduating from high school this Spring, why not rent a 40-foot 'limousine' for the occasion so you and all of your friends can arrive in style and arrive together.  Cruise around the city before arriving at your function in a new low floor bus outfitted with a stereo and a DVD player.  We can help make your graduation night even more memorable for just a few dollars per person.  For more information, please visit us online at www.metrobus.com or call Metrobus Charter Service at 570-2100.

Customer's Corner  A customer writes: I recently visited metrobus.com and noticed the TimeTrack option of your website. An excellent feature, and I'd really like to know how that information is updated. But, that isn't the reason I'm writing. How about taking that information in the TimeTrack and placing it in a RSS feed? We could then check on the actual running times of the buses without loading all of metrobus.com.  ['RSS feed' is a technical term for Really Simple Syndication - a programming format designed for sharing headlines and other Web content in real time]

Metrobus responds: We have been looking at providing an interface to TimeTrack outside of a standard web browser, mostly for display terminals that we plan to make available at some of our busier bus stops. For the web version of TimeTrack, the real time information is actually fetched from our AVL server every 90 seconds (it could be done more often but that would be overkill) and then saved to our web server. When a browser requests the information, he or she is actually requesting the most recently saved file from our web server and not from our AVL server. For the Ride Guide version of TimeTrack, the real time information is actually fetched directly from our AVL server when a user requests information about a particular route using the touch-tone keypad on the phone. That, in a nutshell, is how TimeTrack works. We're still working out a couple of bugs for the phone version, but the web version has been stable since April. Thanks for your interest in our service.