
An idea (to fix public transport schedules). - sahillavingia
http://sahillavingia.com/blog/an-idea-to-fix-public-transport-schedules/
======
andrewem
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_lishin
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.

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yellowbkpk
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.

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jrockway
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.

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singingwolfboy
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!

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thingie
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?

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

~~~
iqster
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>

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antpicnic
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/>

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

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nomatteus
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.

------
darklajid
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..

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wallflower
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...](http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/files/student_projects/Transporter_Thesis_1.pdf)

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

[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time-
public/...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/transporter-real-time-
public/id373726282?mt=8)

------
brianbreslin
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_lishin
> 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?

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

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Benjo
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.

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

~~~
Benjo
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.

~~~
yellowbkpk
Try using <http://metrotransit.org/map/> to solve your first problem (click a
stop and it will show NexTrip for all the bus routes that stop there). That
doesn't solve your second problem though: I have the same problems (and my
wife does on her iPhone). I have an Android app started ... maybe I should
finish it. Is it worth $0.99 to you? :)

~~~
Benjo
The two routes don't come to the same stop. I'm looking for an easy answer to
"Should I wait on Hennepin or Nicollet?" without waiting for multiple pages to
load on my phone.

I'd definitely pay $1 if I thought the app would address those two problems.
Someone has on open source site for just the NexTrip API, but I haven't had
success with it yet: <http://metrotransitapi.appspot.com/>

------
Triumvark
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.

------
untog
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
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.

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cpeterso
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/>

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

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kolinko
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...

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

