A tipster advises us that there was a ConnectedBus event at the Fed Building today, at which Gavin and Nat Ford and Cisco announced that there'll soon be 800 wifi-enabled busses in San Francisco. You mean, sort of like municipal wifi? Yeah, that always goes well.

Details are nonexistent, so treat this with skepticism -- there's no information about this initiative on anybody's website. If it's true and they can pull off this gimmick, well that's kind of neat, we guess. And it would be extra-neat if the city could trick Cisco into paying for it, so we don't shed any more Muni money. But we can't help feeling like this what we were hoping Gavin would pull out of his hat to fix the transit system; it's sort of like teaching a dumb kid how to fold origami when what he really needs is a math tutor.

(And PS: if we're sitting near a bus route, is this going to fuck up our iPhones if we have auto-join switched on? Every time a wifi bus drives by, the phone's going to try to switch from 3G to the network, and then fail after the bus is gone.)

UPDATE! Ah, here we are -- details: the bus has a touchscreen with NextBus info on it, and also some duller features like advertising screens. It's a nice clean hybrid; and there's also some undisclosed features that allegedly make the bus easier to fix. Still no word about when these things are expected to hit the streets -- but we've included some PR blurbs after the jump.