Accurate prediction of bus arrival time is of great significance to improve passenger satisfaction and bus attraction. This paper presents the prediction model of bus arrival time based on support vector machine with genetic algorithm (GA-SVM). The character of the time period, the length of road, the weather, the bus speed and the rate of road usage are adopted as input vectors in Support Vector Machine (SVM), and the genetic algorithm search algorithm is combined to find the best parameters. Finally, the data from Bus No.249 in Shenyang, china are used to check the model. The experimental results show that the forecasting model is superior to the traditional SVM model and the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model in terms of the same data, and is of higher accuracy, which verified the feasibility of the model to predict the bus arrival time.