Buses may be old-school technology (rapid transit now, please!), but at least the folks running our bus system are embracing the future. King County Metro has won several national awards for its Web site, and it ain’t hard to figure out why. The site has a bunch of cool tools, including a video about how to ride the bus (seriously) and a trip planner. The latest is a real-time bus viewer called Tracker. Tracker lets you locate any route, anywhere in the city. This is useful if you’re (for example) leaving work and want to know how many minutes you have before your bus gets to your stop.

A beautiful complement (still in its pilot stages) to all these fun toys is the free wireless Internet access that Metro and Sound Transit offer on certain routes (MT 48, MT 197 and ST 545). Theoretically, with all these tools, a person (a bus chick?) could be riding the bus and at the same time using the trip planner to figure out how to get where she needs to go and the bus viewer to see if she will make her transfer. Very bus chick friendly, no?