A New Website Mapped and Animated The Movements of All TriMet Busses in a 24-Hour Period

Big Brother is watching TriMet.

By Bennett Campbell Ferguson

Did you ride a TriMet bus on September 7, 2016? If you did, you were watched.

DB4IoT (a website that bills itself as "A Database Engine for Internet of Things") has released a video that tracks the movement of every TriMet bus for a 24-hour period (from 3:30 am on September 7 to 3:30 am on September 8).

It turns out that tracking TriMet's property is easier than you might suspect. According to DB4IoT, TriMet buses come outfitted with GPS sensors that track their location. "All of this data is sent from each bus to TriMet's servers on the internet once every 10 seconds," DB4IoT writer Eimar Boesjes says. "TriMet makes this available as a live data stream to the public."

While the ability to follow every TriMet bus in Portland sounds like something ripped from the pages of 1984, the video itself is actually rather goofy. Sped up to show 24 hours worth of movement in three minutes, it represents buses using purple, red, yellow, gray, blue and green dots, which zoom across the screen like Tetris cubes while pulsating electronic music plays in the background.

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