OneBusAway is a project of the non-profit Open Transit Software Foundation (OTSF). It began in 2008 as a graduate student project by Brian Ferris and Kari Watkins at the University of Washington, and evolved to become the topic of both of their PhD dissertations.
OneBusAway began with the simple desire to improve the daily commute in the Puget Sound region by providing real-time transit information, and has since grown into an open source project with an active community around the world. OneBusAway has also made possible a growing body of research that examines the impacts of real-time traveler information on the attitudes and behavior of transit customers.