An idea (to fix public transport schedules).

http://sahillavingia.com/blog/an-idea-to-fix-public-transport-schedules/

by sahillavingia • 15 years ago

14 28 15 years ago

Nextbus.com already does this with several public transportation systems, including Boston and San Francisco. I'm actually in the process of putting together a service to alert riders when the bus is about to arrive, based on that data. It's still in beta, it only supports Boston, it's ugly as all hell and probably broken in places, but if anyone wants to look around, it's live here:

http://www.buscalling.com

PS: if anyone wants to beta-test, let me know!

jrockway• 15 years ago

This is done in many cities with Chicago being one of the largest:

http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/home.jsp

It really changes how you use public transportation because now you don't have to stand around waiting for the bus or train.

alephNaught• 15 years ago

This was done at univ. of michigan as a student project: http://mbus.pts.umich.edu/

iqster• 15 years ago

Thanks for the link to this. Very cool! While the OP describes a crowd-sourced solution, this seems to be a setup where 1 GPS is attached per vehicle.

On seeing this, I have a reaction that I'd like to share. Someone at this University had vision. They seem to have less than 20 buses in their fleet. However, we're still talking about a serious investment (It isn't just the phones, it is also data plans. They might be using their campus wifi network which would significantly lower their costs).

I've tried doing this in other places some time ago. However, it was impossible to get anyone to invest in such a thing. What do you do when you are in this situation? I've done mock-ups, buying initial hardware with my own $$, but still. I guess in our society, pretty much everything comes down to economic value. On one hand, it makes sense. On the other, it makes me sad. </rant>

antpicnic• 15 years ago

In the Seattle area, we have OneBusAway. You can access it from the web, by texting, phone, and via apps for Android,iPhone, and WP7.

OneBusAway started as a graduate student project at the University of Washington.

http://onebusaway.org/

untog• 15 years ago

There's a pilot trial going on in NYC, too:

http://bustime.mta.info/

Has API access and everything. I look forward to it being deployed further, though I suppose it won't make it to the subways owing to them being underground.

dmbass• 15 years ago

There are a lot of stations (numbered lines only, I think) that have "time to next subway" signs which I've found to be pretty accurate. I'm not sure if there is an API for subway info, but they run so regularly (~5 mins or less during the day and 30 mins at late night) that it's generally not that important to get that info. I'm not going to take a taxi because the subway is 15 mins away.

mojotoad• 15 years ago

For the Pittsburgh region (currently) there's the Tiramisu iPhone app: http://www.tiramisutransit.com/

Benjo3• 15 years ago

The Metro Transit system in Minneapolis/St. Paul realtime info:

http://www.metrotransit.org/nextrip.aspx

The timing isn't perfect, but it gives you good sense of "Is there a bus coming soon." I've been thinking about coding up my own UI as theirs is pretty mediocre of what I want it to do.

yellowbkpk3• 15 years ago

What would you want it to do? I may know some people that could change it...

Benjo3• 15 years ago

I use it to check bus times on my way to and from work. There are two different buslines I can wait for, and no easy way to check which one will be coming first - I have to load each page and compare. Also, loading the site on my android phone almost always results in an error the first time - forcing me to load the page again. I haven't taken the time to debug this yet, but it's always annoying when I'm trying to check the bus times on the go.

wallflower• 15 years ago

Ljuba Miljkovic wrote an interesting thesis for his iSchool and implemented an app which I think is one of the best designed out there.

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Trans...

"Transporter: Real-time Public Transit Designed for the Bay Area"

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time-public/...

darklajid• 15 years ago

I thought about this mobile solution as well, as a way to get at data that in my (not humble anymore. Geez, just open up) opinion should be given away by the companies running the service. I like the UK datasets.

I'm coming from Germany. Although everyone complains about public transportation (and the Deutsche Bahn especially) it generally works. If you're at a bus stop, you generally get a nice timetable with all stations and arrival times for each of them.

Now I'm in Tel Aviv: If I'm lucky I've got a plan that shows me the route and ~maybe~ when the bus leaves the first stop. If I'm far away, this is useless..

gavreh• 15 years ago

This already exists in Chicago http://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/eta/eta.jsp / http://www.transitchicago.com/traintracker/

andrewem• 15 years ago

Boston's MBTA seems to be leading the way with this kind of information, and with making it open to developers. http://mbta.com/rider_tools/apps/ lists dozens of web sites and mobile apps which use data about the MBTA's buses and trains.

The MBTA's bus data (via http://www.nextbus.com, the giant in this industry) tends to be pretty good, though sometimes buses disappear from listings and reappear, and sometimes the predictions aren't very accurate, but they're definitely useful. Subway train data is only fed into the system once a train leaves the end of the line, so there tends not to be data for inbound trains for the first several stops. Commuter rail data is still different, because trains are so much less frequent and people tend to aim to be on a particular train which they know based on its scheduled time.

Other transit agencies are much more closed about their data. For instance, DC's WMATA requires you to sign up for an API key and access all data using their web services, even though their bus data comes from NextBus so you'd think they could let you hit NextBus's web services for their data.

There's also the brand-new GTFS-realtime spec from Google, which is a Protocol Buffer format for getting vehicle positions and so on very efficiently. The idea is that you'd be able to get the current locations of all the vehicles in a large system, like the MBTA, in a single request.

(Shameless plug: one of the MBTA apps listed in the app catalog is my web site http://www.mbtainfo.com)

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

The DART in Dallas allows you to look up the real-time location of the next bus inbound to your station.

Combine that with a public transportation system that actually goes somewhere useful in a reasonable amount of time at useful times, and you might have something interesting.

tantalor• 15 years ago

UCSD's shuttle service has a nice example of this: http://www.ucsdbus.com/

yellowbkpk3• 15 years ago

Just about every bus/train will already have a GPS device on it (to help dispatchers and for safety), it's just a matter of convincing the transit authority to release that data into the public.

Minneapolis's MetroTransit, for example, has the ability to do realtime tracking but chose to go with a "n minutes until next bus" system rather than show moving dots on a map.

kolinko• 15 years ago

There are quite a few solutions like this already. Warsaw/Polend has that in some trams and in Subway. I also something like this in Hamburg...

cpeterso• 15 years ago

In the San Francisco Bay Area, BART has excellent (and accurate!) real-time schedules and APIs:

http://m.bart.gov/

http://www.bart.gov/schedules/developers/

thingie• 15 years ago

Well, if our local transit company has a GPS module in every its vehicle on a route and can watch all of them nearly real-time ("nearly" is something like updates every 30 seconds), and we are in Eastern Europe, then any transit authority can. There is no need to "crowdsource" it.

On the other hand, they aren't very good in communicating the information they have. The best thing we have is this: http://idsjmk.jrbrno.cz/ and Google Maps.

There are another problems that are not mentioned at all in the article. Service irregularities, either planned or not. There are frequent tram track repairs, street closures… So, what changes are there on my route, if any? Was the stop that I'm planning to get on moved behind the corner? Where exactly can I get on? And exactly means exactly, cellphone GPS can't tell you decisively if you are at the right side of the road, for example. And that is a crucial difference if you are planning to get on a bus.

And what if I'm waiting for a tram, and there was an accident somewhere and all the trams are delayed. What now? Was a reserve bus dispatched to replace it? When will it arrive? And where, if it's a segregated tramway and the bus can't use the stop?

brianbreslin• 15 years ago

I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this. I see the transit company/department as the customer. In reality they already gps track all their fleets in the US, its just a matter of exposing the data in a digestible format.

If they opened up APIs, some enterprising individual could build apps on top of it, and sell the apps or run ads across.

Sidenote, what about the security issues related to sharing this data? Are there any?

pavel_lishin2• 15 years ago

> I can't honestly see passengers paying extra for this.

People whose jobs are relatively inflexible when it comes to arrival times would pay. My girlfriend basically has to guess and hope that the train runs on time in order to make it to work - it would be super nice to pull up a site when we wake up and see the current locations of the trains, and an estimated arrival time based on actual data, rather than the MTA's dreams and wishes.

It would also be great to know whether a train has recently left the station at night - should I wait 2 minutes for the next train, or should I just start biking and arrive at my destination before the train even shows?

Triumvark• 15 years ago

After reading the problems, I expected we were looking for dynamically generated transit maps (excluding all lines/stops that aren't directly between you and your destination), coupled with a statistical curve of actual arrival times at each stop.

GPS is useful, but when planning a route in advance, I'd prefer to know the above.

nomatteus• 15 years ago

Toronto has this for streetcars and buses. It's run by NextBus, which seems to run GPS for a bunch of cities (http://www.nextbus.com/predictor/agencySelector.jsp).

They offer open access to this information through an API (see toronto.ca/open). I built something to watch the streetcars on a map using that API: http://totransit.ca/

My coworker and I were talking about letting people "check in" to specific streetcars, and tag variables such as "how full is the streetcar?", but I can't see many (any?) people actually doing that.

whalesalad• 15 years ago

http://hea.thebus.org -- honolulu does it! Try stop ID's like 2088 or 297 (right by the university of hawaii)

An idea (to fix public transport schedules).

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