It’s a fun problem. We hire 4 trolleys for our open studio event in Somerville. One of our volunteers bought some smart phones, and we pulled a together a php and MySQL back end, some google maps and Trolley Tracker. We can see them bunch up over the course of a day.
A lot of transportation services have tracking now.
Nice project idea: collect gps data from cell-phone users that are on a train, and based on this data (lots of users moving at the same speed across known tracks), get an overview of where trains are located.
Each bus, trolley and tram has a GPS device. The data seems to be refreshed after ~10 second intervals. Not sure if an API exists to create other apps based on the data.
Cases of misused technology can be quite frustrating.
Our campus van drivers help people move between noncontiguous buildings and they used to use a dispatcher and a radio to do real time traveling-sales-man routing to move people around campus nodes.
A year or so ago, one of their managers had the great idea to use RideCell to ‘help’ the drivers plan their routes more effectively.
Ridecell uses high-latency GPS coordinates from on-board iPads and assumes that nearest nodes also have short edges. The App has no idea that some coordinates that seem close happen to have very long traffic patterns (edges) that makes going from one to the other a very long and inefficient route to suggest (but it does anyway).
Also, the drivers are not allowed to use the radio as often anymore because the managers want data on how effective they are, and the RideCell app has a horrible alert UX for new rides, placing them at the bottom of a long scroll list.
The high-latency GPS coordinates are also interesting as you can imagine the system telling you to pick up someone right ‘next’ to you when you are already across campus...
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.
Nice, I love seeing people work on projects to improve access to public transit.
Regarding a similar project, I've written some backends[1] for the smashing[2] dashboard to show real time locations of buses and estimated arrival times at stops. I run it on a raspberry pi connected to a TV in my front room. When I get up, I turn on the TV and have my weather, calendar, some headlines, and an ETA for my bus to get to work.
Some apartment buildings in LA are using my dashboard to show the nearby buses too.
GPS on buses seems like a no brainer compared to other investments if you want to make public transit more popular. Being able to walk to the bus stop and knowing you’ll wait 1-2 minutes is great compared to running to the bus stop and waiting 15 minutes.
My local authority has had a free public API for a long time and also contacts people following up on how API use is going, arranging meetups for people wanting to code things with the API and so on.
We build an API that can calculate travel times to hundreds of thousands of nearby locations. We don't use any data from Google, which is why we needed to create a public transport database. Let me know if you have any questions.
The desktop website uses flash, but the mobile website uses Javascript. What's really nice is how it uses Google Maps and overlays bus positions in real time. The bus positions are accurate to within a few seconds, so I can decide exactly when to leave for the bus stop and which bus to take.
This is very cool. I wish more municipal transit authorities opened up their data as it seems to encourage, at the least, a hobbyist ecosystem for solutions.
put up a form to ask for the name of the station, and get the browser to share the gps location. also ask for which lines stop here and where they are going.
submit all that to openstreetmap.
then do a search on the station name and gps location and display some useful information.
for the scavenger hunt, save the station codes in local storage in the browser, so that visitors can track their progress but you don't track visitor movements. only upload highscores to the server.
also display a random family friendly joke to encourage scanning.
experiment, see if you can find something that makes this go viral...
Writer here. As someone who spends a lot of time in public transport I am always disappointed in current public transport planners, since they are ‘static’ and can’t handle well disruptions.
I created the public transport assistant concept to explore the possible advantages of live location data within public transport and to investigate the possibility of creating a more dynamic route planner. For example, once we know in which train a passenger is, we can check when this train will arrive at a certain station and act upon it.
My next step will be to create a minimum viable product that encapsulates a basic route planning system (e.g. OpenTripplanner) and the described vehicle classification system.
Let me know what you think, feedback is always welcome!
Crowdsourcing the track data based on where commuters' phones travel, something like waze for LIRR should help.
Instead of asking users to report the track info, it can be automated to a great extent with the use of BTLE beacons on each platform (but that again needs permission from MTA / Penn station authorities unless a long lasting BT 4.0 beacon can be sneaked in somewhere).
Sad that MTA is not cooperating. Can understand why the app had to be shut down!
Well, at least at this phase, I'm solving the very specific problem (dogfooding like crazy here, btw) of having a very set routine that can involve N number of busses where N > 1. Instead of having to look up departure times for each bus individually, you just set a bookmark. Now every morning, I just click "To Shuttle" and have everything I need to know.
Stuff like directions is already handled by Google Maps, though I realize that's not available on all phones.
Agreed. Also just remembered that Google Maps has public transit route-finding in major cities. I'm not sure if this is based on scheduled times or actual times (as reported by services like NextMUNI), but it's a fantastic service.
Transport data for Google Maps is something you have to (and can) lobby your municipal government for. (I'm assuming your transit authorities are under municipal jurisdiction, like the ones in Canada and the US.)
It took us the better part of the last decade, but virtually every transit operator in the Toronto, Ontario, Canada area is now on Google Maps. Not necessarily with real-time GPS, although the transit authorities in more well-to-do municipalities tend to have it.
But you have to work with your neighbours to make it a priority. Whenever they ask for comments (hopefully your municipality is modern enough to ask for this through online forms) then fill it out and ask for them to provide Google Maps data.
(On the other hand, local lawsuits also had a part in it -- a disabled (blind or deaf, I forget which) person sued a local transit authority saying that not having the stops announced was preventing him from using public transit and won. So every transit authority had to have drivers read out every stop until they could install computers with GPS and LCD displays and text-to-speech to read out all the stops. Once the buses and trains all had GPS and computers on-board, adding real-time tracking was just a matter of installing a GSM modem on each vehicle.)
Small world. I did this on behalf of BlirpIt for UVM back in 2009 or so. We had trackers on each bus, and they would report location on a certain interval, or whenever the speed changed by a certain threshold from the speed at last report. We had server-side geofences on each bus stop, and defined a "route" that was just a chain of stops, and then we stored a moving average of time between each pair of stops and that was about it. One of the more fun projects I was doing back at that time!
A lot of transportation services have tracking now.
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