Tag: NextBus

Yet Another City Considers GPS Bus Tracking

GPS bus tracking can be extremely useful for municipalities and public transportation authorities who want to provide top notch service to their customers while at the same time equipping their fleet with superior vehicle awareness and maintenance capabilities.  Several major cities have already adopted this type of tracking to help provide useful information to their users and to aid fleet authorities to better understand the condition of each and every bus in the fleet.  Some notable cities that use one type of bus tracking or another are Washington D.C, Chicago, and San Francisco – with both Boston and New York City considering some form of tracking for future use on some of their bus lines.

There are several benefits that users of these systems list.  Probably the first thing that users love about a publicly available tracking system for buses is that they provide users with more time.  When a user wants to catch a bus to head off to work, to school, or just out for a night on the town then they would normally just go to the bus stop around the scheduled arrival time of that specific bus.  If a bus is late (or heaven forbid it is early) then you have to wait for the bus to arrive – this could take 5 minutes or it could take half and hour in the case of the early bus.

But if the bus is being tracked with GPS then you can be certain of the buses location at any given point in time.  Some bus tracking systems, like NextBus, even employ a complex arrival time algorithm that will give you an estimated time of arrival for your bus given current traffic conditions.  Equipped with this knowledge, bus riders can make more informed decisions about then they should head out to catch the bus resulting in more time spent at home with the family or more time spent at work earning money for their family.

Another benefit often cited by users of these systems is that they help them feel safer.  I suppose that this has a lot to do with minimizing the amount of time that they spend waiting for the bus.  This is probably very useful for women who might feel at risk if they need to catch the bus in a less than stellar neighborhood or who don’t like being outside in the dark very long by themselves.  The less time they can stand waiting around for a bus the safer they feel when using the bus to get from place to place.

For those cities that experience a rather rough winter, bus tracking systems also help people stay out of the cold.  Again, this all goes back to being able to make better decisions about when to go out and catch the bus that bus GPS tracking software give to users. If they were not able to know where the bus is then they could not decide when a good time to head out to catch it is. If they don’t know when to go out to catch it they begin to play it safe and head out well in advance of the scheduled time so that they can be sure to catch the bus that is going to take them where they want to go.

This type of bus real time tracking seems like the future to me. I can totally see a country 10-15 years from now where every major metropolitan area has its bus lines tracked with GPS. It is efficient, useful, and provides a great service to the public. Also, if cities could spread this type of real time tracking to more than just buses and somehow link up all their transportation services this could really help consumers in their effort to make use of the most efficient transportation available to them. People wouldn’t want to travel by car when they could use the laser like precision of public transportation.

The only way we are going to get away from the energy inefficient modes of transportation is by providing superior alternatives – and it seems like GPS tracking is one of the key components that can make public transportation superior to driving by car.

Bus GPS Tracking Software Used For The Common Good

GPS tracking devices have been installed in many commercial and government vehicles for several years now, but it hasn’t been until recently that companies and governments are beginning to make this information know at a much broader level.  They are sharing the information with the people, empowering them to make informed decision about how they want to make us of public and private services.  Most recently, D.C. has seen the debut of 2 bus GPS tracking systems that offer bus riders information about the whereabouts of city buses gathered through GPS.

If you live in the DC area you have probably heard some of the chatter going on about how this GPS tracking stuff is making its way into the hands of regular citizens.  In early July, 2009 the D.C. government launched Where’s My Bus – a website accessible from the Internet and certain mobile phones – that will show a user the distance the next bus is from the stop of their choice on the downtown Circulator system.  This system was developed using open source software in an effort to save money and to give citizens a voice in the programs development.

Then, just a few weeks later, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) launched its own bus awareness webpage that utilizes GPS tracking and an algorithm that calculates arrival times for buses in that system.  This GPS tracking software, called NextBus because of the proprietary information and process that runs the system, provides a much more robust user experience but ended up costing taxpayers a hefty $3 million.

Having two different GPS bus tracking systems unveiled in such a short amount of time really affords those interested in this type of technology a real opportunity to learn something about the different methods of development and what you can expect from governments in the future.  With the Circulator system you have a home-grown, open source software that can be further developed on in later years.  With the NextBus system you have the WMATA buying the software package from another company who owns the rights to the software and the traffic algorithm – development and improvement of the system will happen on their terms.  Which method is better?  Which method provides better results?  Let’s take a look and see.

Circulator Where’s My Bus?

Where is My Bus GPS TrackingWhere’s My Bus? boasts a super simple and straight forward user interface that appears to track two or three dozen different buses.  As you can see from a screen shot of the actual landing page at http://circulator.dc.gov/ it is not going to be winning any design awards anytime soon.  But what this simple interface allows is compatibility on both mobile phones and smartphones as well as being compatible with Internet browsers.

From a development perspective this saves a lot of time and effort.  It can be a real pain to build a rich interface for a computer bases browser and then have to create a simpler version of the exact same information for mobile phones.  The fact that this is what the developers were doing is made clear by a quick look at the html code of http://circulator.dc.gov/ – nothing but simple html written in DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2.

Where is My Bus GPS Tracking Route ScreenWhere is My Bus? is also very simple in how it communicates the next arrival of a bus, as illustrated by the screen shot to the left.  You are given the bus number (which I am sure no user actually knows) along with the route that the bus is on.  Then you are given how far away that bus is from that specific stop.

This tracking system is very simple, but it gets the job done. Sure, there are a few things that the developers could have done to make it much cooler, but they were trying to make both a webpage for desktops and a webpage for mobile phones.  This is hard to do since one uses a 17 inch monitor while the other uses a 3.5 inch display.

My List of Future Improvements:

  • Integrate with GoogleMaps’ travel time engine to get rough estimates as to when buses will arrive at stops.  While this is anything but fool proof, mixing the distance information made available by the GPS tracking technology on the bus with however Google calucates travel time should be better than nothing, right?
  • Get a map on the page already.  This can be done by integrating with GoogleMaps or some other similar mapping application.  Why this hasn’t already been done is beyond me, but probably has something to do with time and money.  This is the obvious next step to making this system that much better.

WMATA NextBus

The WMATA NextBus is simply amazing when compared to Where is My Bus? in terms of features.  Just take a look at the eye candy:

NextBus Bus GPS System Home

But in addition to the eye candy you have a full featured GPS bus tracking system.  For example, if you want to know when the next bus is going to arrive a certain stop all you need to do enter the number in box #1.  Or, if you don’t really know your stop number but you know your route, the direction you are traveling, and the stop you want to catch the bus at you just enter this information and you will get the next three estimated arrival times (as seen in the darker blue box).  Not the distances the bus is from the stop, but a real estimated time until the bus will reach that stop.  This is very useful information.

You will also notice that there is a little phone icon in this dark blue box.  This has a phone number to call in addition to the route and stop number code for your convenience.  How this works is that if you dial the number listed and then enter the route and stop code provided you will with the estimated arrival times.  This is great for people who have a little ways to walk before reaching their bus stop or who will be without computer access for a while but still want to use the bus to get home.

NextBus Bus Tracking GPS System Google MapAnother great feature available on the NextBus GPS tracking bus route system is that it also offer a GoogleMap-like interface for you to see where buses are on a route and when they might be.  It also lets user click on a stop and get the next three estimated arrival times for buses on that route.  This is a very cool feature for users.

I’m not very sure that there are any things that should be added to or improved upon this bus GPS tracking software, but I don’t know how accurate the time predictions are or how usable the system is on a cellular phone.  If this works just as well on a mobile phone as it does on a computer then this system is really neat.

Usability and Which Tracking System Has It

Which one would you rather use?  I know for certain that the NextBus system is more useful than the Where is My Bus? system.  Both are GPS tracking software packages that that give bus riders direct access to this GPS information gathered by these buses, but they do so in very different styles.  The style I like the best is definitely NextBus.  Its maps and time estimates make it much more user friendly and actually caters to how people think about catching the bus.

I mean no one is going to be able to instantly look at a bus being .4 miles away and go, “Okay, the bus is .4 miles away.  A bus traveling on a city street goes about .1 mile every 2 minutes at optimal driving conditions.  But today there is a little bit of traffic that I estimate will make it 20% slower.  I should get to the bus stop no later than 9 minutes from now just to play it safe.”  That is way too much math in public.

While the Where is My Bus? system is a good starting point for development, it is not even in the same league as the NextBus system in terms of usability.

But as a city administrator I would much rather go with the open source version that was cheaper to develop but offers less functionality.  Chris Willey, Washington’s interim CTO, put it this way, “We built it intentionally open so somebody else could make it better.  If you want to find out when is the next bus, we left it open for the community to figure that out. It’s really about creating a community of developers who are creating applications for government.” While this may not give certain people warm fuzzies all over it is sound thinking and wise decision making.

Knowing that a bus is .4 miles away is still useful information – it is just not as useful as know that it will be getting to the stop in about 8 minutes.

Final Analysis<

In the end, I am glad that government entities and private companies are taking up the call to provide useful GPS tracking systems for the common good.  Buses, trains, and trolleys can all benefit from the use of GPS devices.  It is just a shame that the cost to do so is $3 million (the cost of the NextBus GPS bus tracking system).  There needs to be a cheaper, open source solution if governments are going to be able to implement this functionality for all citizens on all lines of public transportation.  That is why the Where is My Bus? tracking system is so interesting – it holds out the hope for a free GPS tracking system for municipalities and states all across the nation and the world.