Slashdot Mirror
Obtaining Real Time Transit Info?
remolacha asks: "I am working on an EU initiative to create small-scale demand-driven public transit (minibuses + GIS + logic + SMS gateway for people to request transit) in rural Ireland. Our plan is to connect several small towns that have no public transit to a bus stop served by a national carrier, so as to enable residents of these towns to reach the two neighboring cities (20 miles in each direction, which have jobs, universities, etc). The thing is, no one wants to be dropped at a bus stop without knowing when the next bus is coming (buses don't come that often here, and schedules aren't reliable.) We'd like to provide real-time information on when the next bus is coming, as you see in some large cities. the problem is our project is so small, none of the companies that make these systems will even give us a quote. so my question for Slashdot is this: is there a homebrew or inexpensive way to set up a display at a bus stop that will tell users when the next bus is coming from a city 20 miles away? There are hills involved, so line of sight isn't an option."
GPS unit from RS plus some bits to tie into a GSM phone and send GPS co-ordinates over GPRS every few minutes. The bus stop's sign would just download the information from the same server you uploaded the GPS co-ordinates to.
Simple and used by numerous people / companies already.
Are you sure that real time data is the way to go with this project?
The arrival time would have to be calculated from the speed of the bus, either averaged or real time. Both would be inaccurate in the context of Irish roads. Irish road distances, both on maps and signposts, are INCREDIBLY wrong. Not inaccurate, just plain wrong.
I've driven all over Ireland and the best way to know how far and how long it's going to take to get from point A to point B is to use experience.
Just get the drivers to punch in an estimated arrival time. It'll be right to within five minutes. Their tachys will show whether they were right or wrong.
The drivers of the buses are going to have driven that road before, in those weather conditions, at that time of the day, in the current traffic conditions. They'll know if Mackey the dairy farmer takes his cows across the Miltown Malbay road at 11.30am EVERY day. They'll know if the Oughterard road floods at this time EVERY year and you have to go "the back way".
If you're standing at a stop there is NOTHING more annoying than seeing a delay tick up. If you use realtime data then the times are going to vary wildly depending on the speed of the bus at various moments. If you average it will just be plain wrong, in the west of Ireland there are a lot of sections of bendy roads followed by straight road, this is because a lot of the roads were laid out during famine times. The roads just meandered along, not really going anywhere, the workers didn't care how long they were, they just wanted to get paid and fed. There are roads that go on for miles before just stopping dead, in the middle of nowhere.
For my mind, the best solution would be to let the drivers estimate. It would also be a better solution cost wise. Just get the estimate transmitted to the next stop.
sic transit biscuitus
You might talk to the folks at NextBus who offer that sort of info for San Francisco's Municipal Railway. (You can check my stop if you want.) They are probably too expensive for your situation (I suspect they're out to make money) but they might at least have some advice for you.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.