It seems that everyone who analyzes historical NextBus data has a different way of archiving their data. There are lots of ways one can use GIS to analyze this data, from creating movies showing the pulse of the transit system, to analyzing on-time performance, to finding bottlenecks.
I was talking to some friends at school tonight, and I realized what a barrier it can be to actually get some of the open-source geospatial tools I’ve talked about on this blog going.
**Update 2012-02-02 17:57 -0800:I just wrote a post about another way to do this.
I really like QGIS. It’s a powerful GIS that runs on Linux (among other operating systems) and doesn’t require incredible amounts of CPU.