One of my biggest gripes with the bus route maps provided by Metro and Sound Transit is that there's hardly any reference to the actual landscape along the routes so unless you already know where the bus goes it's really hard to figure out where the bus goes. And there's no system map on either of those sites letting you see what routes might serve the area you want to get to.
Enter Bus Monster, a brilliant melding of the bus routes with the fabulousness of Google Maps.
You can search for a location and see what buses stop near it. From there you can click on the route you think you want and it will be overlayed on the map. Even cooler, you can load up to five different routes on the map at once to visualize your connections. It's also tied in to the cool prototype bus monitoring system UW-ITS so you can click the pin on a particular stop and get an estimate of when your bus will arrive there.
All of this was developed by Chris Smoak and just went live yesterday, so be gentle with it for a while. And send Chris lots of money.
(via Rhonabwy)