Ottawa transit users can get schedules for their nearest bus stop e-mailed to them or formatted for their cellphone web browsers — but they won't find those services on the OC Transpo website.

Instead, those services have been developed and made available by OC Transpo riders, such as Rémi Plourde, Michael Smith and Dave O'Neill.

Plourde's service, 560 Mobile, allows transit users to type their bus stop and route numbers into their cellphone web browser and get a list of bus arrival times formatted for the tiny screen.

"I just type in the bus stop number, 7687, and the route number, in this case '7', so I know the next bus will come in five minutes," he said, giving a demonstration of the service at the stop near the corner of Bank and Albert streets. "Since I do make websites for a living, [I thought] I would just do something that's beneficial for me and maybe the rest of the community."

Smith's services, OC by E-mail and OC Data, allow users to access OC Transpo's trip planner via e-mail instead of a regular web browser and to download a large portion of OC Transpo's schedules and data at once.

O'Neill's service Webservice OCTranspo, fetches the schedule for a single route at a single stop.

OC Transpo head Alain Mercier said he has no problem with such unofficial transit tools.

"I'm always in favour of people coming up with better ideas," he said. "If we can learn something from someone out there that's got an edge, that's something we look forward to capture."

However, he said, the transit company isn't planning to adopt 560 Mobile or its cousins.

Instead, it's focusing on developing a system where displays at stops will be connected to bus GPS systems and provide accurate estimates of when the bus will arrive. OC Transpo plans to launch that service in a couple of years.