CruzLine

All available bus routes
Arrival times for all bus stops along the 18 bus route

Inspiration

As UCSC students, we grew tired of navigating through CruzMETRO's confusing bus tracking system. With endless clicks and unreliable GPS tracking, it's no surprise that finding a bus has become a complicated task. We wanted to create a more intuitive and functional process for Santa Cruz students and residents to find the bus they need.

What it does

CruzLine is a tool that employs GPS and data from the Santa Cruz Metro system to monitor bus schedules, routes, and arrival times. It helps you search for the most suitable bus for your needs, be it by a chosen bus stop, bus line, or one near your location.

How we built it

Since cruzmetro.com already has all the data we needed, we developed an API to scrape the arrival times and bus locations. We also seeded our database with all the "static" data (bus stops, routes, etc...) to limit the number of queries to cruzmetro. After constructing the backend, we went to work on implementing our user interface. Thanks to the help of NextJS, Tailwind, tRPC, and Prisma, we managed to put together a UI that is quite similar to our prototype in Figma and query real-world data.

Challenges we ran into

The scope of this project was extremely ambitious for a hackathon. Even though we came in with high hopes to complete this redesign, we were only able to implement bus arrival times for bus routes. Aside from not finishing our project, we faced a lot of technical difficulties working with the map and ensuring our markers look normal despite the current zoom. After 5 hours of troubleshooting and switching map libraries 4 times, we finally got it to work!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We pulled together as a team and tried our best to make our lives better. We can truly say we are hackers :)

What we learned

Coming to the hackathon a bit more prepared with regard to our tech stack would have helped a lot. Also, scoping out the project more concretely to 1 to 2 solid features would help make our project timeline more feasible.

What's next for CruzLine

Our goal is to continually enhance CruzLine to provide Santa Cruz students and residents with a more comprehensive and improved experience in finding a reliable metro bus.