Different Ways to Skin the Cat--Bus Arrivals

Metro has signs showing when the next subway trains will arrive.  That's new since I stopped riding regularly (meaning about 13 years ago, so not exactly a recent development).  It's very nice, though people now will take it for granted.  There's been efforts over the years to do the same for urban bus systems: have the stop display when the next bus is due.  I think there've been a few implementations of this.

A different approach than displaying the arrival time at the stop is probably better; after all, once you arrive at the stop unless it's very late you're pretty well committed to taking that bus. So this approach of Google's seems a lot better: display the real arrival times on your cellphone.  Presumably there's the same logic behind the scenes as when the display is at the stop, but putting it on the Internet and available to cellphones is so much better.