More on Dadnab and other services

Greetings. Here is more information on Dadnab, which is taken from an email I sent to everyone in my department. This will hopefully give you a better idea of how to use the service. At the end, there are links and information for similar services in other locations. Enjoy.

Dadnab is a service that you can send text messages to in order to find out bus schedule information. There is a demonstration of the service on their site, with a combo box for selecting the city and then an edit field with preselected text in it. You can of course put
your own text in there. Currently, the service is in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, how ever they are looking into adding several
other cities, including New York, Salt Lake City, and others. There's no charge for the service, aside from normal text messaging rates (provided you're
not already in a texting plan, in which case its free). This seems like a powerful service, and one that provides another option when waiting at the bus
stop.

Some examples of things you could query would be:

4 and Congress to 49 and Sunshine
4 and Congress to 49 and Sunshine by 8:00 pm
49 and Sunshine to Anderson and Foster by 7:30 am on Saturday

Or even "loc," without the quotes in the message of course, for location, and then an intersection. If there's lots of busses that go by that stop though, you'll get lots of messages back. They recommend
using an intersection verses a street address for best results. Provided that the city has a trip planner and its schedules online, the service can work
with them.

When texting, you will send the message to:

Cityname@dadnab.com

Where “city name” is the name of the city you want to search for schedules in. Then put the query in the text area. Refer to the site for instructions on specific numbers for different cell carriers. If you text Dadnab a lot, and
you have to put the email address in the message itself (which is necessary for a few carriers), you can setup a template with the address already in there.
Then you insert the template, and then you only have to write the query. Enjoy.

Addition: If you don’t live in a city served by Dadnab, then perhaps you might find the following services of interest. You can get schedule information from the site or by text messaging. Refer to the individual site for details.

Hop Stop,
offers bus and subway directions for Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and Washington D.C.

Google Transit
offers directions and information for cities in the following states: California, Florida, Hawaii, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington. Only selected cities are listed so refer to the site for more details.